FLOWER SHOW TACTICS.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXII, Issue 8944, 9 October 1907, Page 4

FLOWER SHOW TACTICS.

There arc dear good people who have a souse of comfortable deliverance from evil when they discuss the wickedness of business competition in great cities (says the Pall Mall Gazette.” They are to be envied, the happy lot that, while not precisely making a virtue of necessity, knows little of the necessity that makes a mock of some of the gentler virtues. But far downright competition commend ns to the country flower and vegetable shows. One had hoard of the man who sits up with a shot gun keeping guard upon his big gooseberries: it would appear that lie knows what he is doing. At Weston, near Bath, a grower named Hobbs was sent for fourteen days to prison recently for visiting a rival’s garden and sticking needles into his beans, cabbages, marrows, and onions. He explained that, suspecting the rival in question of winning prizes with bought vegetables, he had wished to satisfy himself that this was not the case. At the show lie would be able recognise his little punctures. The Bench, however, took the view tharfc it was not a perfectly harmless scheme, and that in any case it was t¥S be defined as wilful damage.