FROM OUR EXCHANGES.

Temuka Leader, Volume 2, Issue 116, 25 January 1879, Page 2

FROM OUR EXCHANGES.

Fifty tons of D'Uiviile Island copper ore is on its way to Newcastlee to be smelted. The New Zealand Meat Preserving Works at Washdyke recommence operations to-day, and already 15,000 sheep are booked. Last season 65,000 were boiled down. News from Hongkong stales that a disastrous fire occurred there. Ten acres and a half of buildings were destroyed, including the civil hospital and police barracks. The loss is estimated at £200,000. The Waipawa County Council are advertising for an engineer at £SOO per annum. Applications, with copies of testimonials, will be received by the chairman of the county up to the Ist March. From advices received by the New Zealand Shipping Company at Lyttelton, the steamer Stadt Haarlem was to leave London for New Zealand on the 28th January. She brings 600 immigrants and will load cargo and passengers direo 1- , for Home. The Victoriau expedition to New Guinea was decimated by disease, hardships, and conflicts with the natives They were all sick and unable to work the ship or find a harbour. Tlv-y, therefore, lay to for a fortnight and were eventually found. A novel application of the telephone has come under our notice. This wonderful instrument has been long used in the warehouses of our city for business purposes, but recently wires have been stretched between two or three private houses, and the corrt spondence kept up. Besides being very convenient, it is also productive of much amusement.—' Otago Daily Times.' The special wire business is not an unmixed benefit. The principal newspaper l offices in the colony are being nightly flooded with a quantify- of matter, to no purpose, while the calls on the department are more than it can bear. Business j men, indeed, people of all clises, who have to send private messages, are at present loud in their complaints, and wo venture to say that in two or three months' time the dissatisfaction whl be so great that fresh arrangements must lie made. We warn the Onmmi-ioner of Telegraphs that the service is rapidly becoming disorganised, and cannot possibly bear the present strain.—' New Zealand Times.' The 'Dunedin Morning Herald' is pleased to learn that the Committee appointed at. the meeting in the Athenceum on Friday last are determined to carry on with vigor the work entrusted to them of obtaining the re-introduction of Biblereading in our public schools. Steps have been taken to form an association for the purpose of making the influence of the ratepayers felt at the forthcoming elections ; and various sub-committees have been appointed, together with a paid secretary. Owing to the want of room in the various schools in Dunedin a great number of pupils presenting tlumselves a few days ago had to be refused admittance. In the case of one school st least, as many as ninety-three were refused. The additions now being made to the schools will provide accommodation for four or five hundred more scholars, but even this, it is certain, will not be nearly sufficient ; and the erection of another large shool in Dunedin is, therefore, a matter of pressing and urgent necessity. Mr Britten, captain of one of the London bycicle clubs, has just shown the remarkable capacity of this machine, and strength of his own frame. Starting from Hyde Park corner in London, at midnight on Wednesday, he reached Bath at 11.30 a.m. on "Thursday, and after a short rest started on the 'return journey, and reached Hvde Park corner a! 11.55 p.m., very fresh after so long a ride. The whole distance of 212 miles, including stoppages for refreshment, was covered in 23 hours, 55 minutes—the longest run that has ever been accomplished iu one day. It is amusing to listen to the explanation of defendants in the catt'e straying cases, as to how the offending animals managed to get adrift. The favourite defence is that, the cow or goat, as the c\se maybe, had not been out of ken for more than five minutes, while others accept the inevitable, and plead guilty with a becoming air of resignation. One defendant recently said the slip panel was down, and so let the cow out. The R.M. remarked that it was the duty of the defendant to see thai; the panel was kept up. " Lor' bless you, your Honor, that cow of mine can take down a panel like any Christian." replied the owner As e'even shillings and sixpence was the price of that cow's cleverness on this occasion, it would be as well not to encourage snch feats.--'Bmce Herald.' The local 'Star' thus bewails the state of the "foreground" of the "great intangible prosperity" of Waimate :—Melbourne has been not inappropriately called the city of unfinished public buildings, the scale of upon which they were originally designed not having permitted of the completion of a single one of them, and our township of Waimate may justly lay claim to the honor of the name of the town of abandoned or deferred projects. We have a visionary hospital, an uns-bstantial Court-house ; a shadowy Fire Brigade engine, building and watch | tower ; a Volunteer Corps, whose march j to martial music with all the " pomp and i circumstance of glorious war" is «s yet •

unknown to our townsmen ; a public racecourse, &c, in perspective ; and a park for recreative purposes unenjoysble at_ present, owing to its whereabouts being- unknown, and its beauties as yet unrealisable. The colliery accident in South Wales, ( vaguely specified as at the Rhondda mine, both in our telegrams and in the Special " to the 'Post,' is, in all probability, in the Great Western Colliery, situated about one mile and a-half up the Ehondda Valley, above Pontypridd. From an intimate knowledge of the locality, we fancy it he no other workings than the Western, as, if it had been the Cromye still some miles higher up the Rhondda, where over one hundred lives were lost some fifteen years since, some indication of the fact would have appeared. The Great Western is an old colliery, and has workings running several miles under the hills, and the gas for years back in the fiery No. 3 seam has been difficult to manage, and although the colliery—if it be the one we imagine—has hithsrto escaped accident of a grevious character, has always required constant care and watchfulness. In 1869 its out-put was about 100,000 tons per annum. The depth of the shafts were 150 yards. Higher up the valley the celebrated Ferndale colliery explosion took place in 1867, when 184 dead were pulled to the surface ; but this colliery was working in the four-foot steam coal seam, a far more dangerous measure than the Rhondda. No. 3. Ferndale bekmged to the DaviesBros., one of whom was with Dr Hector for a long time, and on the West Coast of the Middle Island. —'New Zealander.' In an article on education, the Melbourne ' Imperial Review ' says: —"The primal object of education is to teach everyone to procure sufficient food and clothes. It is almost superflons to remark that this is the great point in which education fails, because most people are behindhand in their food and clothes. The art of securing these things includes many ingredients, which, it is the duty of the educators to be able to teach. Mr G. A. Sain, in a recent ' Illustrated London News' states that an unfailing | source of i-elief from the agonies of bronchitis and spasmodic asthma will be found in the following specific :—The juice of two lemons, which have been warmed in the oven to dry the skins; four ounces of the best honey ; two spoonfulls of the best Florence oil. Mix carefully, put in an earthern jar, which keep covered, and swallow a spoonfull. when you feel the fit coming on. Russian newspapers relate some romantic attachments which have sprung; up between Turkish prisoners of war and Russian ladies of various ages in the towns where the former have been detained, leading in some cases to somewhat sensational and rather inconvenient scenes upon tho departure of the Turks. At Charkoff a Russian girl, dressed up as a Turk, took her place among the returning Moslems. She was detected on numbering the persons conveyed in the car. At Poltava a young- 1 :ily of position and education insisted upon accompanying a Turkish officer with whom she earnestly desired to be married. At the same place, the departure of one way train carrying liberated prisoners to a regular s-ene, necessitating the interference of the police, and calling for orders which have since been given to prevent similar occurrence-; in future. A crowd cf ladies, young and old, sorjneonly s.-hoolgirls, assembled on the p'aV fonn and took leave of the departing Turks in the mn,-t pathetic and demonstrative of ways. All emln-ac-d, all kissed, some burst into tears, others fainted away. All this was done in public. The schoolgirls taking put in the display have since been expelled from the school. A correspondent of the ' Otago Daily Times,' writing from Sin Francisco, gives the following advice : —Why not make the breeding and rearing of hogs a specialty of New Zealand farming ? It is the most profitable branch of the American farm, overtopping sheep and cattle ; and indeed, the "blooded stock" craze in cattle on the whole is not found to pay. Wool is liable to great fluctuations in value. But men must eat, and pork, cured and packed, is Jjat all times, in all seasons and every country in demand, despite the Pentateuch. Why not, therefore, turn the tables upon British exporters, who buy "English hams" in Chicago and St. Louis, and send them "English hams" cured in Dunedin or Oavuaru ? Nothing could pay better. But the quality must be prime to com- j pele with American, of which you already , consume so much in the delusion that it | is of British origin. I am the more impressed with the value of this advice by observing the development of this branch . of agriculture combined with co-operative dairying all over this counhy. Culesa you make the most of your position, the Pacific Slope will be at your doors with its surplus. Your soil and climate are exceedingly favourable to dairying and bog-rearing ; and my conviction is that your merchants have suffiicient enterprise to find a market if the farmers produce the raw material of manufacture*. The following sensible remarks by a*- • Wellington clergyman on the relations : % between certain employers and employed, will be easily applied by our readers to appropriate cases. I venture to express my conviction that employers in regulating their payments take too little account of the amount of responsibilty they impose on those they employ, and the publie is about the worst sinner. We give our public servants barely enough to 'support them; we require them to live respectably ; we load them with money which is not theirs, and afford them all manner of opportunities of appropriating it. Then we wonder when sums one m an evil hour yields to temptation, and pounce upon him in the name of a wronged and virtuous public. It is often plausibly urged, a man need not go into an office, —no one obliges another to en- ; counter such temptations. On the con- j trary, I assert that employers do tempt, ■ and are answerable if the temptation sueceeds, when their system of payment does , not recognise the strain that is put on > the moral strength of those they employ- \ And uere it a case of an oveix-harged j boiler bursting and kibing half a dozen j men, no such shall--w pretext would ba j allowed for a moment as that the men ': were not obliged to work iu the factory. j It is for the public to sot the example to | other employers, and pay not only for j brains and sinews, but also, and chiefly f for responsibility. "It must needs be j tha 1 offences toitie, but ivoo t-j liici j through «. l.'om they come." j

It is a Bdiking fact (says the Wellington correspondent of the'' Argus') that, in B" ; of Ministerial boosting, the Queen's"writ does not run through the North ls--1 a:d. A notorious murderer is sheltered by the Moaris, and the Government seem afraid to ask for him ; yet if a white man slaughtered a Maori the law would at once lay hold of him. The want of boldness on the part of Ministers is all the more astonishing because a very little firmness would put everything right. The whites ar Q , now so numerous, the Maoris so few, and their numbers so divided, that if a little pressure were put on any one tribe they would at once submit and deliver up the murderer.