Going to Hospital.

Patea Mail, 3 August 1880, Page 2

Going to Hospital.

A poor fellow suffering from asthma and acute bronchitis, was admitted into the County Hospital the other day. We are told he was brought to Patea in a cart, but when he got as far as the school-house, on the road which ought to lead to the Hospital, the driver looked in vain for any way of getting across the intervening ravine. He tried Mr Haase’s gate, and would doubtless have braved the terrors of threathened prosecution for trespass if he could have got through that paddock ; and we should have had to report his adventure in the form of a police-court romance. But Mr Haase, having been tormented with too many trespassers, including Hospital Committees and funeral processions, now keeps that gate locked. The driver was non-plussed, and stood kicking hia heels with impatience, trying to think what could be done. [Whj' does kicking the heels aid in deciding difficult problems ?] The poor sick man was left in the cart shivering in the cold and wind of ono of our bleakest days, while (he driver was prospecting for a track to the Hospital. Luckily he was noticed by someone at the Hospital, and just as he decided to desert bis cart and scramble across the ravins to the building to enquire if there was any possibility of bringing the sick man there dead or alive, the steward went running forward to explain, by shouting across the ravine, that by making a detour round by the Wesleyan Church, a short-quarter of a mile, it was possible to drive a cart along under careful guidance, without turning it quite over. A convalescent patient recently in Hospital had levelled down the most dangerous ridge along that roundabout road, which until then wss nearly as dangerous as the famous pass of Thermopyl«, or that Pons Asinormn that proved fatal to so many members of County Councils and other statesmen in their school-boj- days. That poor man was labouring under such maladies that only dire necessity justified his being exposed to the cold air at all ; but when he was slopped on the edge of the Hospital ravine, and deserted by his driver, and was then rattled back past the Immigration Barracks and up and down over ridges and gullies, he would doubtless reflect that “Jordan was a hard road to travel,” while he might have had a flash of recollection of that still more famous passage, “ Rattle his bones over the stones, for he’s only a pauper that nobody owns.”