PATEA COUNTY MAIL PUBLISHED Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. SUPPLYING STORES.

Patea Mail, 17 July 1880, Page 2

PATEA COUNTY MAIL PUBLISHED Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. SUPPLYING STORES.

Attention should bo drawn to the desirability of having the supply of stores to the Patea camps of Government employees placed on the usual contract basis. It is to be hoped there is no official intention of denying to local storekeepers a proper opportunity of tendering for this work. The contractor to the camps on the Plains has been instructed, we believe, to send stores to the Patea camps at the rates he contracts to deliver them on the Plains. We have nothing to do with the rates, but the principle of public tender is too important to be wiped out without protest. Those matters should be arranged - ''vmractnr with imT'Plains is the same to us as any other contractor. It is the healthy principle of public tendering for Government work that requires emphasising in this case; and no incidental consideration influences our opinion in affirming that it will be a grievous impropriety for any responsible official to allot the supplying of stores at the Patea camps to some individual, without allowing local merchants an equal chance of tendering for supplies within their own locality. Is this to be done ? If not, pray let the public know why an exception is made in this case; and let the public know the names of those officials who are responsible for making that exception.

PERILS OF THE ROAD. Da Keating is now installed at the County Hospital as resident surgeon. Inquiries have reached us as to how the doctor got there, seeing that there is no road, and that the only feasible passage is to climb over Mr Haase’s gate —the which he now keeps religiously locked—and having thereby got into a private paddock, a steeplechase leap has next to be taken over a fence to roach the Hospital porch. If Dr Keating would inform the public how he gets to and from the Hospital—that is, if he could do this without incriminating himself re a suit for trespass—it would be useful information for those persons who are thinking of getting themselves laid up in the Hospital for medical treatment. Surprise has been expressed that the Hospital contains so few patients. The fact ought to be explained that only those invalids aylio can climb gates and jump over fences have any chance of getting to the Hospital. The County Council and the Patea Town Board have laid their heads together, and arranged to keep down the Hospital expenditure by not having a road made to the building, so that patients shall not be encouraged to lay themselves up, as they might do if a level road were provided. The plan is novel and efficacious. It puts a check on medical malingering; but the contrivance is just a little too effective, for when an able-bodied patient, goaded by desperate pains, has performed the steeplechase run to the Hospital, and has become convalescent, he finds himself imprisoned there through the greater difficulty of getting away. If, in the course of nature, that patient has to be carried out box-wise, the difficulty becomes desperate and pitiful; for the sad funereal train must go slithering down a slope into a deep gully—as deep as the well-known Yale of Tears—and must climb up the other side, grasping at rushes to pull themselves up like climbing a tree ; or they must get over that fence and locked gate by means of borrowed ladders, at peril ot having themselves and the dead man bailed up before the R.M. for trespass. If these things are done in the green tree, what may not be done in the dry ? Dr Keating has informed his friends that, under stress necessity, yet with fear and trembling, he risked the passage of his furniture to the Hospital on

-'.f • : drays. There being no direct road, the drays went on a pioneering expedition round .about, up and down. As the drays containing his furniture, medicine chests, <fec., went up the siding behind' the Wesleyan Ghurch,' and tottered for a moment on the giddy verge of the abyss below, his “ heart was' in his mouth ” with apprehension. (This awkward dislocation was happily reduced without medical aid!) The wagons went up and down in leap-frog style, with skijful navigation and piloting, and did not actually upset, though near it many times. The final feat of mounting the ridge is, he says, an event to be remembered, being about as risky as it used to bo for a vessel to run the gauntlet at the mouth of the Patea riverWe imagine the resident surgeon must now consider himself “ settled for life,” as the ordeal of removing hfs furniture from that medical hermitage must be more than a prudent man would attempt a second lime. As to the doctor's fur..W Mnostly s »y. m pace.”