Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 2

Recollections

Recollections

Visitors to the Auckland Museum are very much amused by a copy of one of the first news-sheets produced in that district. The particularly amusing part is a paragraph which reads like this: « We have just stopped the mangle to record the arrival of » —and here follows the name of a vessel, which has slipped my memory: but the « mangle » sticks there! Ah, necessity was truly the mother of invention in the early days, and many were the shifts resorted to to « catch the mail. » There are some of the old hands among us who recollect those days, and who could relate many an amusing as well as historical reminiscence of the days of old.

How often now we wish, as one after another of the « battered and worn out » assortments of all sorts and conditions of men known as comps « turn their flags » and hand in their revise,—which we hope will bear the Great Reader's « correct » —how often we wish we had been the « chiel amang them, takin notes. » Many's the story these knights of the stick and rule have told round the stone while waiting for copy, at supper-time, or while putting in one's dis. As I now write, old faces are outlined on my copy, and I cannot help smiling as I picture them striking match after match endeavoring to keep their pipe alight while recounting something which is always prefaced by either— « I remember, » or « That reminds me. » I well remember F. O., who used to fill the boys with his tales of the old days, but if ever you dared to hint at passing the salt-cellar, never more would the veracious one open the storehouse of his memory to you. One day he was telling me about his adventures on the West Coast of the Middle Island—nearly all, if not all the old identities of our craft have pegged out a claim on the gold coast round Hokitika, either a gold claim worked with a pick, shovel, and cradle, or a lead claim in a comp's gully, worked with a stick and rule. In F. O.'s case, he pegged out a claim held by a miner's right, and turned a better doc. than case would have given him. He has always been an enthusiastic fisherman, which occupation has for years been his recreation. On the occasion of which I am writing he was telling me of how on one of his recreative days he went forth to one of the adjoining creeks to cast his line with the intention of tempting by force some of its slippery customers from the creek's muddy depths. Our bold fisherman puts his hat on his head at an altitude of at the most 4ft. 6in., one of the disappointments of his life being that when the Crimean War was being waged he wanted to enlist, and on being subjected to « the standard » he failed by just an inch to tip the beam. (Dear, dear, copy is too plentiful, I must stick to my yarn.) After landing a few nonentities of the fish world, for he is a most lucky hooker, he felt something of a wriggling, and he thought that he had bagged a sack* this time. True enough, he landed a champion, and our fisherman was pleased. But, how about the eel? Here are the narrator's words: When the beggar saw who it was that had landed him, he was so disgusted that he stood right up on his tail and barked at me. I smiled, and innocently informed him that eels never barked —but, he never yarned again to me. Would you learn the moral—If you wish to hear a good thing, Don't pass the grain of salt! T.L.M.

* A peculiarity of the eel—he does not dart about like a decent fish, but seems « listless » when induced to laud.