Speeches may be good - at the Town Hall steps the other night speeches plus the band gathered in five-and-forty young fellows for Kitchener's second million - but music in the streets is better, has ''more snap and ginger,'' a correspondent of the Daily Times discerns, corroborated in the London papers by Kipling.
Herein verily we are at fault.
So musical a people, yet for war purposes so tuneless!
From the Canadian cadets who visited us a year or two back we learned how much may be done with the drum.
The Canadian drums were in effect an orchestra.
Apropos, the Canadians, such is their military spirit, profess themselves good for 300,000 men if Kitchener requires them.
Kitchener will certainly require another hundred or two from Dunedin;-to get them, Dunedin requires martial music, more of it and better.
The 80 men we sent away this week marched to the station behind drums and fifes from one of the schools, a puir show for Kirkca'dy.
Their music as they passed the Octagon was the ''Marseillaise,'' sombre and tragic-Allons enfants de la patrie,Le jour de gloire est ar-ri-ve!
A compliment to our allies and we often hear it; but the ''Marseillaise'' was never a British marching song.
There are dozens and dozens, historical, traditional-English, Irish, Scotch-dearer to the army than ''Tipperary.''
Let us have ''Bonnie Dundee'' next time, please, and ''Garryowen,'' and ''The girl I left behind me.''
There is romance in the last, there is the gaiety of heart that goes with the soldier, there are tears.
It is to the strains of ''The girl I left behind me'' that the British regiment that has ''got the route'' marches and marches away. - Civis
The work of the fish hatchery at Portobello last year consisted chiefly of rearing the stock of turbot which was brought out in 1912.
One hundred and ninety-five fish, the largest the size of half-a-crown, were placed in the tanks in April of that year.
To-day there are 194, many of them being 16in in length.
This result, unequalled in the history of fish hatcheries and marine aquaria, has been brought about by the scrupulous care and attention bestowed on them by Messrs Anderton and Adams.
It is intended to increase the tank accommodation and, if possible, retain the fish over another winter when, it is expected, they will commence to spawn.
Turbot commences to spawn when from 12in to 19in in length, and produce enormous quantities of eggs.
If the first grow too large to retain the whole stock then a proportion will be turned out on some sandy beach away from trawlers and fishermen and the remainder retained for spawning.
The probabilities are that this finest of European food fishes, which grow to as much as 3ft in length, will be permanently established in New Zealand waters at a ridiculously low expenditure of money.
The Rev. Father Birch, speaking at an early mass in St. Francis's Church, Paddington (Sydney) on January 24, said he was grieved to notice a number of young women and girls, attendants at the various services, who remained sitting or standing at even the most solemn parts of the mass.
He supposed that the skirts they wore were too tight to allow them to kneel.
Their action was a grave scandal, and it would be almost better if such people remained away altogether.
He had received several complaints on the matter from parishioners. - ODT, 13.2.1915.
