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New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5211, 4 December 1877, Page 3

Mr. Roberts, the contractor, is building three villas of a very superior class near the Colonial Museum in Bowen-street. They are of brick and will be two storeys high, an ornamental iron balcony running along the front. The bricks which are being used arc being made by Mr. Hill, of Taranaki-street, and are of a very solid character, the clay of which they are composed having been passed through machine rollers, after which process the bricks are said to resist dampness, a very important ingredient in their manufacture. The erection of brick buildings in the place of wooden structures is evidently on the increase here, and ultimately the greater part of the city, no doubt, will be built of brick or stone. It is said that the cost of a brick building is very little more than that of a wooden one, and the fear of earthquakes throwing down brick buildings seems to be dying out. It is very seldom (observes the Fiji Times) that attention is drawn to the fact of any person dying from the effects of nostalgia, but such an occurrence has recently taken place in Levuka. Nostalgia is described as “ home sickness, or a species of melancholy resulting from the absence of one’s home or country,” and a time-expired laborer recently died from this very longing. The poor fellow, who was employed in a household in Bevuka, while awaiting his departure per Menschikoff, used to sit for hours at a time gazing seawards, a week or so back having passed the whole day on one of the jetties in anxious expectation of being taken on hoard. He was an extraordinarily quiet and inoffensive man, industrious, with quite a genius for culvert or road making. He never complained of sickness, and although his temporary employer noticed that the man was ill, none of the usual simple remedies seemed’to affect him, and he gradually sank and died. His decease was no doubt primarily attributable to the cause indicated.