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Oamaru Mail, Volume XXIII, Issue 7367, 15 November 1898, Page 3

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It must have been the very printer's devil himself who represented a very worthy advocate of the cause of female suffrage as exhorting her hearers to " maintain their tights." What the'bridesmaids at a recent wedding have thought when they read that they had all worn " handsome breeches, the gift of the bridegroom," one can oniy guess.

But whatever their thoughts may have been at seeing their pretry brooches thus transformed, their language at any rate cannot, we may assume, have matched that of the politician who read the following comment on one of bis speeches : —" Them asßes belie"ed him." Possibly he was not much consoled by being assured that the reporter had merely wished to signify that " the masses believed him." On another occasion a reporter wrote : "At these words the entire audience rose and rent the air with their shouts." The compositor had set up shouts correctly, but had not observed that the top of the h was broken off, making it " snouts." An enthusiastic editor began hi 3 leading article on a local election campaign with the phrase, " The battle is now opened " Dnfortonately the compositor transformed | battle into bottle, and hiß readers said tbey had suspected it all along. But the ladies suffered still more severely at the hands of a Washington reporter, who, describing the costumes at the Presidential reception, had intended to say that " Mrs B. wore nothing in the nature" of of a dress that was remarkable." He left hurriedly for the West next day when he opened the paper and read : " Mrs Brown wore nothing in the nature of a dress. That was remarkable." A London paper reported on one occasion the capture in " mid-channel of a large man-eating shark." A provincial journal, copying the paragraph, but less careful about the punctuation, gave a different version of the incident" A large man, eating shark, waa captured in mid-channel." In the following instance it was, no doubt, a bachelor compositor who, in se' ting up the toast—" Woman, without her man would be a savage !" by a trifling transposition of the comma made the sentence read, "Woman without her man would be a savage."