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Inangahua Times, Volume II, Issue II, 27 May 1881, Page 2

We publish to-day the remaining portion of the evidence given on Monday in the District Court, in the case of M'Lean t. Keep-it* Dark Company. The matter was unavoidably crowded out of our last issue, It is understood that Mr Gr. G. FitzGerald will reach Keefton in time to address the electors ou Saturday (to-morrow) evening. At the calling on of the matter of the Victoria Company in the District Court on Monday last, it was stated that a sum nearly sufficient to discharge the whole of the liabilities of the company was already in hand, and before the next sitting of the Court, th« full amount would be collected, thus dispen • aing with the necessity of casting the com* pany's affairs into liquidation. Upon the strength of these representations the matter was further adjourned till next Court clay. It ! would appear that the prospects of the shareholders of the Union Company are not so hopeful, no effort having been made to arrest the conrse of the liquidation. The appointment of Mr G-. C. Bowman as liquidator, was duly confirmed by the Court, and the full machinery of the law has therefore now been set in motion against contributors. The winding up proceedings nrc, however, likely to prove very involved, numbers of the shareholders having transferred their shares, others hive filed, while others again have reuii-ed their assets, and buttoned up their pockets, in firm preparation for the worst. The liquidation will be disastrous to solvent contributories. The determination of Judge Broad to adopt the dictum of Judge Gillies in rein t ion to the refusal of discharges to insolvents in estates where there are no asset?; whatever doubt there may be as to its strict consonant with the sp'rit of the Bankruptcy Act, v ill ut lecst have the cff:ct of tightening t h§

rein upon dishonest debtors. That the privilege of bankruptcy has been enormously abused is beyond any manner of doubt, and any check that can be fairly interposed by the Court to cure the evil will, therefore, be hailed with satisfaction by the trading public. The death of Mr Frank Mathias, which we record this morning, will, we are sure, cause a feeling of regret on the West Coast, throughout the whole of which the deceased gentleman was widely known and esteemed.. Mr Mathiasjjfor mnny years honorably filled the appointment of chief clerk in the Law office at Hokiiika, Upon the discovery of the reefs here he was induced, through failing health, to resign hh position, in the hope that change of pcene and the more active pursuit of sharebro ing would bring him a restoration of health. He wa9 fortunate in securing interests in mnny of the beat minep, and as his health showed no improvement, he after the lapse of a fpw months, proceeded to Tasmania where lie also invested in mining. Visiting Reefton 'once since, he during the past two years, took up his residence in the North Island, and lately proceeded on a short trip to Fiji, where'he died on the 18th instant, through the bursting; of a blood vessel. Mr Mathias has relations in Canterbury. ; . ■ In our last issun, we called attention to the patent absurdity of som6 comments made by the Innnpahua Herald upon the case of M'Loan v. Keep-it-Dark Company, and showed that these comment*, absurd and all as. they were, reflected very injuriously uoon the defendants. This we did at the speciar request of the directors of the company, ourselves fully concurring in the necessity for the correction. For this we have been treated to a column of very edifying abuse ; but what Mr Warden Whi'efoord, and Jack Whelan, or Northumberland House, have to do wi:h the matter, our readers, like onrselves, will probably not clea»ly perceive. The necessity of our correction ha?, however, been proved fully by the wretchedly lame and obsequious apology which it has been deemed expedient to make to the directors of the Keep-it-Dark Company, lest it should reeult in a " possible loss of business," In the case of the National Bank, it is to be presumed that the policy of '• expediency " dones not fit in, for so far from according that corporation a similar apology! we have the following additional thrust, " Of course, as compared with a corporation such as the National Bink the '.plaintiff is very small tbeer indeed." This ia what is vulgarly termed " rubbing it in," the obviou' effect being to elicit sympathy for the plaintiff in the ense shortly to be tried in Heefton against the Bank, So far asfthe imputation of M toadyism "is poncerned,' T w* can well afford to feel amused at it, the 'more so because it affords us an opportunity of saying for the writer's especial edification, that we are as independent of the National Bank as we are of " Northumberland House," and the more noble quadruped with its* back to the setting sun. We have no desire whatever, as he alleges, to lower the writer in public esti» motion, it would be quite impossible for o.s to do so, nor have we ever sought to " condono" any remarks we have made concerning tils bosom friend, Whelan. A few people in Reefton have just received a rather sore lesson in financing. It seems that a man aarived here recently from Ghreymouth, and managed to get a number of valueless cheques into circulation. Two of the victimised holders of the worthless paper placed the matter in the hands of the police yesterday, and the matter will probably be brought before the Court in a day or two. Mrs M'Gabey has been pronounced to be of unsound mind. Fire Brigade practice will be held at the engine-room, this evening. There are still papers which actually affect to believe that the .Grey Ministry expended £15,000,000 during their term of office. W ill one of them be good enough to prove that statement f It has been already announced that Sir Garnet Wolseley will be raised to the peerage. This dignity is conferred on the distinguished General, in order that he may in the House of Lords, conduct and explain the new scheme of military reform, which he will personally supervise at the Horse Guards. Sir Garnet had, of course, the first claim to supreme ommand "n South Africa. He is acquainted with every mile of the ground over which thp antieapated military operations will be carried on. and must naturally have been most anxious to undertake the task for which he' is so well fitted. It has, however, been deemed still more important that his services should be retaine J at home in the important work of reorganising our military establishment. The Hawke's Bay Herald Bap:— 'Mr Bolleston is the one staunch upholder of secular education in the Cabinet. Ha hue a Lieutenant very lukewarm, in Mr Oliver On the other side are ranged Mr Hall, Mr Dick. Mr Johnston, and Major Atkinson. Whitaker would no doubt, jnu the majority, caring very little which side got the victory. We have thus four confessed denominationalists in the Ministry, one staunch secularist, and two independents. More improbable things have happened than that a Ministry so constituted should appeal to the country on the religious education cry. If so, they will seek their own doom. Tt is a noteworty fact that the three leaders — Issao Butt, William Shaw and Charles Stewart Parnell — of that great national movement of Home Eule have been Pro- ; testants. | The Auckland Star declares that in the stomach of a heifer recently killed in that city were the following articles. — Seven chain links (about one inch long), seven stones of various sizes, 15 thick screws (some two inches in length), 21 large nails (some of them threes inch) 84 iron and tin tack?, two bolts and washers, and several pieces of sharppointed tin. An Invercargill paper says :— Constable "Freetwell came up from Otara on Monday, und deposited in the police station money )

documents, jewellery, watches, and other articles taken from the bodies that have come ashore from the wreck of the Tararna. The cash and other securities taken from 25 boJies amounts to £147 odd. The watches and a considerable quantity of the valuables are, as a matter of course, battered and valueless ex* ccpt as old metal. The documents are in a very fragmentary condition, and it wns a tedious operation to piece them together. One proved to be a receipt from a solicitor to Mr Marsh, acknowledging that he had deported with him deeds connected with chemical works at Chorley, Lancashire. Another was so much destroyed that only the words « Halscome ' and "' March ' are legible. The relics have been made up into parcels and docquetod ; most of them will probably. find their way into the hands of public Trustee. ConstableJFreelwell.returned to the scene the same afternoon. Tlie Waikato Time9 gives the following particulars of a dive taken by a son of Colonel Leckie who recently went irad in that district :— The R.BL-of the Waikato district, Mr Northcroft. being at Waitoa with a carriage and finding young Leckie in the hands of the police, who had a sack over him, to serve the purpose of a *Wraight«waißt-jacket, and kept him in a tent, brought him awuy with him to Hamilton. On reaching the bridge at Hamil* ton. whilst Mr Northcroftf'was engaged paying the toll, Leckie got out of the tr.ap"and threw himself over the rails of the Sridge between the cenrent pier and the wooden pier where the riverjisjthe deepest and there i* a strong eddy, He turned over and over in his fall, a d'-pth tiff s4 feet, and struck the water head first. On rising, the first part that was seen of him was a foot, but he speedly floated and swam to shore like a duck, though heavily weighted with clothes.' A constable who happened to be near the spot at once secured him, ..: We (Waipawa JMaii) bad occasion, some time ago, to refer to the growing tendency of weak-kneed magistrates, when obliged to en» force (he law, apologising to the criminal?. Several gross instances have been reported by telegraph lately from Wellington. The latest case was a double breach of the Licensing Act. Spirits were sold toja child on a Sunday, and the magistrate inflicted the minimum fine, remarking that ' the only comfort he felt in having to inflict a penalty on an offender in a case of this kind was the fact that the public mind would be so directed to the ridiculousness of the law on this subject as to induce people to force on Parliament an amendant of the law.' It was stated that the spirits had been required by a ' sick lady '—a story which showed the deplorable absence of original inventive genius on the part of the accused. This same ' sick lady ' is trotted out in ninety nine cases out of every hundred of Sunday liquor-selling, and in the hundredth the liquor has always been 'given away '.(?). Wellington just now is gaining an exceedingly bad name for drunkenness and consequent immorality. No wonder. The Government would do well to relieve this apologefiS R.M. from *he painful duty of ' administering^ the tyrannical lawa of the colony. Dr Foord Olark, a young sea-goingr surgeon and an enthusiastic savant, arrived in San Francisco a short time since as the surgeon of a British chip from Calcutta. The voyage was lolng, and as it was so monotonous as not to furnish to the active intellect of the youug surgeon all the phenomena that the savant could crave, one of the midshipmen determined to improvise some phenomena for him. At first he contemplated a sea-serpent, but as sea-serpents are becoming very common and are a good deal of trouble, he finally des ♦ermined on the electric light occasionally seen by unusually tough shell-backs aloft in the rigging of ships at sea, and which is known as St Elmo's tire. He got the mate's bull'seye lantern, and on a very dark night he climbed aloft, lit it, and made it fast at the mast'head. Descending he rushed into the oabin and announced to the doctor a remarkably well developed case of St Elmo's light. The doctor bounded on deck, ex» amined the light, made a sketch of it, and finally the midshipmen boldly volunteered to go up and interview it. He went up, blew the light out and descending, told the doctor he bad touched the flame with his finger, whereupon he instantly received a tremendous electric shock, and St Elmo's light disappeared. Dr Clarke found the depraved young man's pulse at 102, so he put t 'e midshipman's arm in a sling gave him a drink of brandy, and put the midshipman and both slings into the siok bay, and thereafter, during the rest of the cruise, and as a premium innocently paid to a case of very atrocious wickedness, he prescribed to tha young hero who had blown St Elmo's light out of the mate's bull's eye lantern, daily rations of tobaoro and 'grog. Upon the arrival in this port of the John o'G-aunt, Dr Clark wrote a very abstruse account of the matter, which was published in an evening contemporary, and he also-forwarded to the London Graph'o a much more detailed account of the phenomenon, together with water-colour sketches of it which he had made. The doctor having subsequently railed from this .port as the surgeon of the Zea'andi*. Thomas Y. Fowles, commander of the John o'Gaunt, to whose knowledge the perpetration of the joke had come, also in a communication to the evening contemporary, 'gives the whole business away,' not to raise a guffaw at the expense of a young gentleman whose acquirements as a scientist are admitted by both the bodies, but that the joke that beguiled the tedium of a long voyage and the excellence" of its own inception and execution may be made par* douable, and may not serve as a false beacon for other scientists. — San Francisco Chronicle. One of Mrs Harapson's converts acted very strangly at Dunedin recently. At the city police-court a man named Eichard McPherson was chavged with being illegally on the premises of Mr Tofie Id, jeweller. He gave as an 'excuse that he was on his way home after hearing an address by Mrs Harnpson, which had somewhat affected him, and, seeing Mr Tofield's door open, it occurred to him that he might as well go inside and offer up a

prayer. He accordingly diJ so, and was crouched down uttering a few words of supplication, when he was perceive 1 an \ ar* rested, As Sergeant Bevin, who was conducting the business of the Court, remarked, a jeweller's shop was certainly a remarkable place for him to be fouud praying ; but the Bench were disposed to give him the benefit of the doubt created in their miuds, and diecharged him. His Honor Judge Gillies is something of a humourist, and can on occasions give utterance to good things. This was evidenced on Fridny last, when the Judge occupied the chair at the Shakespeare Club's entertainment. At the termination of a scene from the second act of ' Coriolanus,' His Honour paid a very high comp ixent to the young lady who read the part of Volumnin, and wound up his remarks with the affectionate sentence :—* Tell her I love her so.' The prim mamas in the audience stared with Bnrprise, and the modest young ladies blushed and giggled at this ontspoben profession oi love by such a sedate looking gentleman as the Judge, and such exclamations as ' Well. I never !' * Oaly fancy !' and ' Such impudence !' might be heard whispered about the hall. The surprise vanished however, when a good-looking young gentleman stepped upon the stage and begun 'to warble in sweet tenor tones, ' Tell her I love her so/ which happened to be the next item on the programme. The Judge's joke was at once per' ceived, and the risibility of the audience wa» excited thereat, while His Honour sat still, looking 'as serious as a jud.-e,'apparsntly unconcious of the hit made by him. — Saturday Advertiser.-