Fires at Waiorongomai.

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2073, 1 February 1898, Page 2

Fires at Waiorongomai.

The composure of Waiorongomai was ruffled on Saturday by the advent of the fire-fiend. A fresh breeze had been blowing all day from the north, and when the chimney of that ramshackle old building, known a decade ago to the travelling public as the ‘ Premier ’ Hotel, was observed to be on fire, with a shingle or two beginning to. smoke in sympathy, the whole place was thrown into, a flutter of' excitement. Mr Martin Murphy, the proprietor of the- licensed premises at the corner spent doubtless a disagreeable quarter of an hour, on account of the uncomfortable proxi mity of his building to the scene o of the outbreak, pending its suppression. Fortunately Mr Michael Oreain was passing, and as subsequent events proved, he was the man for the occasion . From the scene of the incipient conflagration he promptly did the disappearing act, only to return* however, staggering under the weight of a ladder as long as a may-pole, which he fixed against the side of the house and surmounted with the agility of an able bodied seaman. Having gained the roof he lost no time in bonneting the chimney with a eouple of empty potato sacks he had taken up with that object in view. This done he extinguished one by one the burning shingles, and they say Mr Murphy’s sigh, of relief might have been heard at the end of the township. Mr Cronin is a man of sagacity and resource and thoroughly deserves the good opinitrh of his fellow townspeople. One would conclude that the foregoing would have furnished sufficient excitement for one day but no, the fire-fiend was evidently having a day out, and bent on further mischief. Just at nightfall Mrs Swain, the wife of a well-known Waiorongomai miner, raised another alarm and true enough her cottage was. ablaze beyond the hope of redemption. Willing bauds ■ were not wanting but the- means, to cope with the flames were;-, so the neighbors, as. in, the case of the H t Springs Hotel fire-in Te ! content themselves with looking on, and gradually increasing their distance from the-roaring furnace the cottage ' rapidly became J Mr Swain was. insured mihe amount of £9O only, and is naturally a loser;; nor is he the only sufferer Messrs Smith and Read, who were staying in the house, lost everything—Read* we understand, a stock of money he- had- put by.