Extracts from Gco. Eliot's Letters.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 100, 2 May 1885, Page 5

Extracts from Gco. Eliot's Letters.

These are a fow pregnant sentences from George Eliot's letters :-" On old age : I wonder if you all remember an old governess of mine who used to visit me atFoleshill— a Miss Lewis ? I have found her out. She is living at Leamington, old, but cheerful, and so delighted to be remembered with gratitude. How very old we are all getting ! But I hope you don't mind it any more than 1 do. One sees so many contemporaries that one is well in the fashion. The approach of parting is the bitteraess of age." "On living at home and abroad : Sunlight and sweet air make a new creature of me. But we cannot bear now to exile ourselves from our own country, which holds the roots of our moral and social life. One fears to bee me selfish and emotionally withered by living abroad, and giving up the numer oug connections with fellow countrymen and women whom one can further a little towards both public and private good." "On the responsibility of success : Even success needs it 3 consolations. Wide effects are rarely other than superficial, and would breed a miserable scepticism about one's work if it were not now and then for an earnest assurance, such as you give me, that there are lives in which the work has done something 'to strengthen the good and mitigate the evil.' " [ \" On gambling tables : I am not fond of denouncing my fellow-sinners, but gambling being a vice 1 have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sipht of the dull faces bending round the gamingtables, the raking up of the money, and the flinging of the coins toward the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women starintr at the board like stupid monomaniacs— all this seems to me the mostabjoct presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the face of this little earth. Burglary is heroic compared with ifc. I got some satisfaction in looking on from tho sense that the thing is going to be put down. Flell is the only right name for such places." " The late Mr Fawcett : If Cara values die article on Strikes in the ' Westminster Review,' she will be interested to know— if she has not heard it already— that the writer is blind. I dined with him the other week, and could hardly keep the tears back as I eat at table with him. Yet he is cheerful and animated, accepting with graceful quietness all the minute attentions to his wants that his blindness calls forth. His name is Fawcett, and he is a fellow o r Trinity Hall, Cambridge."

M. de Harven has been offered 10,000 acres of good bush land at Eltham, Opunake Road, for the purpose of a Belgian special settlement Captain W. B. Scandrett, of the Invercargill Rifles, has been appointed to the rank of Major on the unattached liet. Under British rule there live about

285,000,000 human beings. Sub-tropical industries for the North are still being agitated, The Premier, at Whangarei, on Wednesday, favoured the founding of a Horticultural School to foster the establishment of new farming pursuits. One verse in the Bible, Ezra vii, 21, contains all the letters of the alphabet, except