Ill-Luck Omens.

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 192, 7 April 1932, Page 4

Ill-Luck Omens.

Omens regarding ill-luck are so generally accepted that the experienees of a party of trampers who visited Stewart Island during the holidays is worth recording. The company, which numbered thirteen, left Bluff by hoat on a Friday, equipped with new billies which, in the trampers eyes, spell ill-luek and when they entered the sitting-room in a boarding house at Halfmoon Bay, the first thing that caught their eyes was a broken mirror! With all these premonitions it was not surprising that some anticipated trouble ahead, hut strange to relate their stay in the picturesque ilsland, during which they travelled far by hoat and on foot, was entirely free from any untoward happening. As a matter of fact the most perfect weather prevailed throughout, and not one of them succeeded in even so much as contracting a common cold. Their faith in illomens has been shattered and all now regard them as an exploded myth. Inquiry for Air Mail Stamps. An outcome of the use of air-mail stamps in New Zealand recently has been a brisk enquiry from overseas collectors for .specimens. Requests have been especially numerous from the United States and Canada. Airmail stamps used in the original communications between Auckland and Invercargill are particularly in de^= mand, and are rising in value.

Freak Potatoes. While potato growers vie with one another as to the greatest weight of a single potato in their season's crop, it has been left to a North Invercar- . gill gardening enthusiast, Mr. W. D. Willis, of 24 Syb}ey Street, to produce something that will take a power of beating for novelty and freakishness. From a single root of his crop of Sutton's Supreme, dug recently, Mr. Willis secured a cluster of potatoes firmly grown together and comprising five large and four smaller potatoes which were well grown, while on the same shaw were two smaller clusters containing two and three well formed potatoes each. Mr. Willis informed a News reporter that the weight of the larger cluster was 21b 6oz and that it was the first time in a long experience extending over 40 years that he had seen such a freak. An Invercargill resident who recently visited Wanganui, when shown the cluster, remarked that a similar happening had been reported there though the size of the potato and its appendages was much. smaller. The novelty is at present being exhibited in a shop window adjacent to the in a shop window.