MISCELLANEOUS.

Inangahua Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1329, 28 November 1883, Page 2

MISCELLANEOUS.

Another fa.vdurite illusion (says the Pall Mall Gazette) haß received its death blow. Arctic exploration, even when most successful, is but a gathering of Dead Sea apples. The North <wjest passage is discovered only in order to demonstrate its uselessness, the myth of an open Polar Sea, with a oircumpolar continent inhabited \>y happy men who live behind the north wind, has vanished into thin air; and pow Professor Nordensjold announces that his successful expedition into the interior of Greenland finally dissipates the hope^ he has so long entertained of discovering oases of fertile land behind the ice belt on the coast." "Over the whole inland there is ice." Greenland is no green land, as the explorer had hoped to find it, but in very truths desolate wilderness of eternal ice. It must have been a melancholy task for the famous traveller to destroy his own hypothesis, and instead of achieving one of the triumps of scientific prediction, to j register his own mistake, but that is the fate more or less, of all arctic explorers. Even the North Pole, when it is reached at last, will probably add but one more item to the long list of the disappointments which have awaited all travellers in the frozen seas. Few poet 9 die rich, but it appears that Mr Longfellow leaves £80,000. This is good news, for no bard ever deserved prosperity, better than Amei ii^a's sweetest singer. Mr M. M. Pomeroy (says the San Francisco Bulletiu) tells the following convincing temperance story : — "Some years ago we had in our employ a man who several times a day ran out of the office to buy a drink of whisky. Every time he went out the cashier was instructed to drop ten cents in the drawer to our credit. At the end of seventeen months the man who had gone out so often had drank himself Out of a good situation ; and the drawer when opened was faund to contain 409d01, which we lotted to a young mechanic at 7 per cent, interest. He used it to purchase a set of tinner's tools. On the 1 5th of February, 1876, he returned it to us with interest, saying in his letter that he had a wife, two children, and property worth 500dol. The other poor fellow is a bummer, hunting for food. " Civis " in the Otago Daily Times t-ays:—-' Nemo "writes that he reads Passing Notes to his children (I am hardly complimented) and missus (that is better) but the other day found that he was reading " the wrong end of the paper" : — " I was not reading you at all, but the Reefton correspondent's opinions about Reefton reefs. You will excuse me, won't you, when I tell you he is not anything like you. He is more like Mark Twain, without the fun. There is no fun in following bhe advice of this Reefton man. Mark Twain, always afforded fun without serious losses. Mark Twain, when

writing about reefs, said he never saw gold. The miners always told him of shafts, shif.s, tunnels, adits, stopes, backs, faults, pinches, machines, roads, clips, tram ways— no gold, no dividends, and plenty of calls — and future prospects. This is what the Reefton man has been saying for a long time past." — " Nomo." I infer from the tone of 4iis remarks, knows more about West Coast mines than is good for his peace. He is not the only Otago man who finds tho Beef ton correspondence dismal reading. I don't buy mining shares myself— never descend to that form of gambling ; but if " Nemo" will hand- over his — (paid up, of course — no future calls) — I will receive them, purely as an act of Christain charity. After that he will be able to give an undistraoted mind to Passing Notes, and I will take the anxiety of reading the Eeefton man. ■ That husband of mine is three times the man he was before he began using "Wells' Health Renewer." Druggists. Moses, Moss & Co., Sydney, General Agents.