The Telephone. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, THURSDAY, JUNE 12.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 155, 12 June 1884, Page 2

The Telephone. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, THURSDAY, JUNE 12.

Mr. W. L. Rees says he never reads the Telephone. Mr. Rees, like George Washington, is a man who cannot lie, or perhaps he may be like Mark Twain who says he can lie but wont — nothing would make him say what was not true, short of sheer necessity. Mr. Rees never reads the Telephone. That he told his hearers on Monday, but as he quoted correctly from several issues of the Telephone during his address, the question rises how did he become possessed of its contents. In the words of Hamlet, “ That is the quervestion." As Mr. Rees does not read the Telkphone, yet still is en rapport with its inside columns one can only surmise that he gets some one to read it for him. Let us imagine the following : —“ Aly dear,” says Mr. Rees when he reaches home. “ I can't read the Telephone any more than I can tell a fib. Will you read it to me ? And it is read ; and Mr. William Lee Rees leans back on his chair and says how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to live for an ungrateful and thankless people. I have got for them the Whataupoko. I have got for them the Postoflice, and the Postoffice clock. I got them a bridge. I got Sir George Grey to come down here and spout like a whale. I got things for them which no one else could have ever got, and then Allan McDonald’s friends up and say it was he who got them, and the Telephone publishes the whole thing. Then comes a sigh, followed by a dead pause. When the

lady who shares his joys, and divides his griefs. looking coyly at her lord and master says, “ Aly dear—-was it Washington or Baron Munchausen who expressed his utter incapability to tell a-a-a-you know what I mean. It is a word that is written in three letters ? ’ It may not be in the way mentioned that Air. Rees gets at the contents of the Telephone. Perhaps it is by clairvoyance, or by the agency of spirits,—but to get at the bottom of the mystery let Air. Rees be asked seriously whether he is really and truly quite sure that he never does read the Telephone.