HONE DROPS A LINE

Shannon News, 10 September 1926, Page 3

HONE DROPS A LINE

AND SCOLDS HIS GROCER. As an orator the Maori is pretty good in his own tongue, and even in his broken English he, is generally fairly clear as to meaning, even if somewhat quaint at times; but when Hone puts pen to paper he is apt to be a bit of a puzzle to his cprrespondent—that is, of course, the Hont> who has not worried much about his schooling. Some Maoris write a beautiful hand, but an Auckland suburban grocer has a customer whose handwriting is anything but caligraphy. This particular native deadly loves tearing a piece of paper off a block—he never by any means uses a whole sheet —and in queer pencil scrawl he tells the man, of the store exactly What he thinks of the goods and other things. Occasionally the meaning is decidedly misty, and it required a long acquaintance with the workings of the Maori mind "to make out what he is driving at. "Dear Bill," he writes, for the Maori seldom masters our pakeha epistolary preliminary conventionalities, "Got akount from your last night not see in my doket 1 lard 2 butter 5/3 was Stratich out that why I send my grils down PS about my cheese, I don't say you do up the good some, if you seem it you wood not take it look every tink was on your floor was on cheese." The comma was the only stop Hone could muster for this effusion, which is somewhat vague, but sufficiently clear to show that Hone did not care, for his peck of dirt on his cheese all at the one time. On another occasion Hone wrote: "De&r Bill Why you send Butter the last time & this your levear me owt look it Paid day come you want to know how must is my Paul I want Butter or not." Hone rather reminds one of Mrs. Gamp. . If you take any of the speeches of that estimable lady they very seldom make sense if read literally, and it would puzzle a university professor to parse some of them, but you never fail to get the drift of her remarks. It is much the same with Hone when he takes up his pen, and there are only two people who can really decode Hone's motelets, they being Hone himself and his grocer, and no doubt Hone would be much gratified, if he knew that both these quoted above are to have the honour of a frame in the grocer's private museum.