THE WAYS OF THE WORLD.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1397, 26 September 1885, Page 2

THE WAYS OF THE WORLD.

Once more into the irk dear friends, once more, but what <an I write about? There’s the rub. Allmj acquaintances are behaving themseves so decorously that they really give ne no room to say anything about then. I believe the whole community his entered into a vile conspiracy agaiist me, so as to leave me nothing to say. Very well ; T wont be beaten : I kve the whole world to take stock of, and as local topics are so dull, I rman now to take a glimpse at things in gneral.

People bore talk abut depression. The fact is they do mt know how to make money. They do not possess the genius for it. Here I a wrinkle for them :—“ At Ghent gone time since a woodman called attenton to a man hanging from a tree, cuthim down, and sold the rope at ont-aid-a-half francs an inch to a number of people who believed in its taligrnauic power. It now appears that the suicide had shot himself, and the woodman, willing to turn an honest penny, strung him up. The buyers have brought an action* to recover their money on actount of fraud.” The people of that district believe that a rope which has ended the troubles of a suicide possesses jertain virtues. You can fancy their disjust at finding that the man had shot hioself!

Persons nearer Home possess money - making attributes. In London recently an influential lady was appealed to by a woman, who asked assistance to bury her dead husband. The good lady—for there are kind-hearted, good, generous ladies in London—went to the woman’s house, and there, sure enough, was the coffin with the man in it. The lady handed her purse to the disconsolate widow aid left. She, however, had not goie far when she remembered she had forgotten her reticule, and retraced her s:cps, to find on arriving at the house tee dead man sitting up in the coffin anti counting the money she had left to buiy him ! That man possessed the money-making talent in an eminent degree.

A short time ago a young man called at a house in a remote part of Hawkes Bay, and asked the woman he found alone there to assist him with a man who had broken his leg in the bush not far off. The woman advised him to go to a house near by, There he would find a man who would help him. He went, and soon returns! with the news that if the woman o:' the first house went to keep company with the woman of the second house, the latter’s husband would assist him with the man with the broken leg. The good woman agreed to this, but wlen she arrived at her neighbor’s house she found the young man had not been there at all. She hurried back to her own house to find that it had been robbed in her absence. The young man was too much for her after all.

Talking about depression and distress brings me to a sickening story. William Morrison, a Scottish carpenter nut of work, was wolking lately from Paisley to Dundee, with his wife and seven children, when a child of three years old died of starvation and exposure, This in a Christian country, in the “ land o’ cakes!” “ Man’s inhumanity to man ” allowed this child to starve.

There is one place on this Earth widows shonld not go to, and that place is India, There are 21,000,000 widows, more or less, in India, and not one of them is allowed to marry.

Some time ago a lady went into a shop and noticed a camels-hair shawl, which she was told was worth £4O. She told the shopman she bad not money enough to pay for it, but she would give him £2O, provided he promised her to call her husband’s attention to it, and tell him the price of it was only £2O. In that way the husband would think it coat only £2O. A shoit time after she called in and wag told her husband bad bought the shawl for the £2O, She went away, wondering why he had not taken it home, when, to her disgust and astonishment, she saw a lady with whom her husband was intimate wearing the same identical shawl ! Who could blame her for feeling annoyed ? She had paid £2O of her <wn money so as to bring the shawl down to a price which would induce her hatband to buy. He did buy it, but

not for her. He gave it to the woman of whom she was jealous. It was hard on her, and who could blame her if she gave her husband a hit of her mind that evening ! Cori O’Lands,