OMNIUM GATHERUM.

Observer, Volume 5, Issue 116, 2 December 1882, Page 185

OMNIUM GATHERUM.

. The proprietor of the Napier Bottling Cellars wants to buy a dawg to keep off the premises persons who call at his cellars after midnight, to wind up a spree. How will this suit the churchwarden, the accountant, the special correspondent, and the chorister the next time . they fall down his steps ? At an up country court the other day a brute man was fined £5 and costs for cruelty to ahorse. It seems that towards evening the animal became tired and refused to work, when the wretch procured titree and lit a fire underneath its belly. In consequence of the injuries the horse has since been shot. In the far North, the native policeman is enforcing the dog-tax. The settlers do not oare to make a display o£ dogs at his visit. Q-enerally ■one is acknowledged, and others are concealed in ■bowers and thickets in the back garden, or in the a "titree. But the "bobby " is aware of the trick, .and has one of his own for the emergency. Eiding up to the suspected premises he sets up a well imitated bow-wow-wow, and he is answered not only by one, but by five or six dogs from 'their various hiding-places. He counts the barks, and takes the money. Maori constables are a ••success. -Oh joy ! It has come at last after all those weary years of waiting ! How long and jmVatly have we pined for this day and now . when the dream of a lifetime is realised we v^ could bow our heads and shed tears. A Kauroa \£oWrespondent informs us that one of the local pjlts has been pronounced a hopeless lunatic and , sen £to the asylum. This is too much. Let us hop ie that it will inaugurate the dawn of brighter l{ j a .; s when society will become alive to its duties .and | rosponsibilitiee, and bucolic poets will be

following incidents which occurred during a trip to a certain township — An intoxicated member of the demi-monde, and a very dissipated gumdigger, exhausting their vocabulary of endearments upon each other, alternately with Anglo-Saxon expletives not to be, found in any standard dictionary ; a drunken orgie by a clerk, local constable, and another ; a jam-tart lady awfully squiffy, who suddenly makes a delicate communication, in a staccato voice, to her fellow passengers, one . of whom conducts her to the platform, where she clutches the rails with one hand, and passes the other round his neck. Tableaux! Our correspondent thinks there is material for a sensational novel in the Zola style. We think it would be decidedly in the Bolar style — in fact rather too sultry altogether. But where are the police ? Mr Henton, of Auckland, has a grievance, and like a true born Briton he seeks to ventilate it in the Press. Henton was strolling around Mount Eden when he caught the distant strains of vocal music proceeding from a Band of Hope meeting. For the susceptible soul of Henton, music always possessed an indescribable charm. It drew him into the building with the force of a magnet. In his aesthetic enjoyment of the soul-stirring strains Henton was overcome by a sudden sympathetic impulse, and began to commune with some girls j in front. How this communion was carried on Henton does not say. He has all the reticence of extreme modesty, whether, in the exuberance of his. aesthetic enjoyment he began to hug one of the fair creatures, is not precisely known, but just | when his joy was at its height, an officious Sunday-school teacher, or something else, with well oiled hair parted down the middle, an aggravatingly smirk expression of countenance, and a saintly upward cast of the eyes, flew at Henton in a towering rage and threatened to *' pull him

miracle He performed was the manufacturing of wine, and that not for an invalid, but to make merry with. So, as we are told to copy his doing as closely as possible, James H. Coad has (finding it impossible to make miraculous wine) succeeded in brewing wonderful Beer." Everybody knows that we are not enamoured of the school of preachers to which Mrs Harnpson belongs. The spectacle of a female of full habit holding forth on a public platform, and welcoming, fallen sinners with a kind of semi-uxorious effusiveness to the font of spiritual grace was too much for our poor weak nerves. We eschewed Mrs Hampson as Artemus Ward shunned the female Shakers. But we would prefer even Mrs Hampson and her trail of goody-goody satellites to the shocking and audacious blasphemy of this fellow Coad. In fact Coad's code of decency is on a par with his beer, if his language is any criterion. What is the Licensing Bench of New Plymouth doing ? If the Sunday school teachers and Keristian young men of New Plymouth have a particle of spunk in them they will go straight for Coad's scalp.