PATEA MAIL PUBLISHED Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1880. A SOCIAL LAMENT.

Patea Mail, Volume VI, Issue 515, 4 May 1880, Page 2

PATEA MAIL PUBLISHED Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1880. A SOCIAL LAMENT.

Parties and balls are few and far between in these parts. We are too far removed from the giddy whirl of follies in fashionable cities to catch the brisk infection which impels young folks to run mad after balls. Ours is a quiet, dreamy,' money-getting existence, “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” From Monday morning to Saturday night is with our people a monotonous round of small profits and slow returns. Some lucky settler makes a “ pot of money,” hut instead of inviting his old “chums” to help him rejoice over his luck in a round of sensible jollity, the churl -quietly, gets drunk, or carries his money and his stinginess elsewhere. Let him go. A real good fellow with an average income and a free hand, with a taste for .social pleasures and a leaning towards a romp at a pnb_ lie ball, is . worth twenty fat settlers whose hearts arc inside their money bags. Small ton ns never proper by such grasping follows. Men who have a capacity for public affairs, and can preside one:day at abankniptcy meeting? and the next night load the dance in a social party, always ready with a song and never lost for a story, knowing everybody and on easy terms with all • around, —that’s the sort of settler for those colonial cities in miniature. Wc cannot keep a theatre .going through the winter months; our public balls are few; and complimentary dinners are still more rave. C oncerning these last, there is a wide field for public dinners. How would it do to have a standing committee for promoting public dinners ? It is a peculiar trait in the British character that nothing can bo initiated and nought can be wound up without a good sot.feed. That is the rule at Home, and Britishers in a colony have not quite lost the old habit of eating for the love of the thing. It always was dangerous to stand between a hungry man and Ins dinner. Even tca-pavtios, those cheerful Sunday-school scrambles, arc rare in those parts ; and our ladies do not seem to engage with English zest in the afternoon social “kettledrum.” We are all going to sleep for want of some local committee to give the right impulse to our inclinations. Wo want some genuine public “ spree” once a week. Let it be a ball this week, a concert next, with amateur theatricals to follow, and thou say a miscellany of intellectual fun in the shape of penny readings, which our people would think cheap at sixpence. It is so easy to keep these things going when once started on. a good footing, that if a dozen of our most gonial public men would co_ operate to give such movements a good start,, they would confer a boon of real value to Carlyle and its vicinity. As it is, wc all go to sleep after sundown, and rust away our energies in dull depressing lethargy.