The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1887-10-15 00:00:00

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THE STOURBRIDGE OBSERVER.

.) AA E NTS ON CURREN NE WS

Ws have been having sharp frosts and
even snowfalls in most parts of the country,
and. yet we are only half-way through
October. Are we to expect another rigoroqs
winter? It is only a week or two since we
sought he shade eagerly, to escape the rays
of a schorchincr sun. Ours is, indeed a
climate of quick mutations, and one may
well be excused recalling the saying that an
Englishman's constitution can stand any
country and any weather, from Greenland to
the Tropics, and from the hot simoon to the
blasts of Siberia, or even the malaria of some
equatorial "dismal swamp.".

Tir agricuhural ontlook will be anyth'ng
but bright if the cold cheerless weather
comes before we have had a taste of St.
Niartin's slimmer, that enjoyable season
which should succeed Michaelmas, when the
sun breaks, bright and cheering, over the
bracing October woodlands, bright with the
gorgeous tints which come before the leaf-
fall. If we must look up to skies always
ashen and sober, and suffer successive spells
of cheerless cold blight and surface trost,
with sloppy sleet, long after the corn seed
has been "sown in the mud," we may look
darkly ahead to nest year's harvest. What
we want is a fine autumn, after drenching
rains, and then, with the healthy winds of
winter, ice-locked lakes and frozen rivers,
timely snows, and an invigorating atmos-
phere. Let hoar December and chill January
be as searchingly cold as they will, but spare
us from a winter which begins when the
harvest is scarcely garnered and continues
until the blossoms of May should be on all
the hedgerowe. What we want is a re-
arrangement of the sequence of the weather
supply which has seemed sadly awry since
our American cousins commenced business
in meteorological messages. Oh! for the
old-fashioeed winters, with snow wreaths
deep along the roads and ice thick over all
the water. sent in season between the la t.:r
and the former rain ; for the bright spring-
times of ages ago, with their glory of
greenery and fresh sunlight; for the land.
mellowing autumns that came when the
cornlaed was turned into stubble ; for the
hot summer that made the wheat and barley
a blaze of red eold, heaven-pointing, life-
giving vegetable beauty. Now-a-days the
times and seasons seems sadly out of joint.

WITH the wintry weather comes the bitter
cry of the unemployed. "We must have
work or bread" is written on the woeful-
looking banner which the waifs of London
carry *bout frora Traf Ilgar-square to the
Park They storm the citadel of Govern-
ment at the Board of Trade, and demand aid
in their extremity ; their destitution pleads
loudly for them as lie, thinly clad, under the
frosty sky on the seats along the Thames
Embankment. What philosopher can solve
the problem of poverty in the metropolis and
the big towns of Britain? He would be a
worthier statesman than those who waste
their time or talents in the hot conflict of
party strife.

When all is chill and cheerless in the
streets, one's charity is wont to be invoked
at sight of suffering or privation ; and the
hand opens, and the heart throbs sympathet-
ically as the shoeless and &ioirties3 beggar
asks for alms. We, from 'our pity, give re-
lief, full often forgetting to take the trouble
to look below the surfaco, and :see whether
we are bringing joy to one who has been
worsted in life's cruel battle, or whether we
are bat enabling some lazy ne'er-do-well to
exist a little longer without doing his duty
to himself and his fellows. How easily too,
the cry of the children can be converted into
a method of swindling the genAou.sly dis-
posed. In oar big towns, as the -winter
draws on, half-naked little ones are t”ailed
about mercilessly in the hard weather by
sturdy vagrants, so that their poor pinched
faces and shrunken spindleshanks may ap-
peal irresistibly to the passerby, and bring
in the coppers for their custodians to indulge
in a carouse. Let us sternly discountenance
this increasing practice of beggars dragging
babies and bairns of tender years about, in
their " buskings "in the steeets of our towns.
With oar bene:olently wise poorlaws—mach
as they are at times decried there is no
necessity for such ex ibitions of inhumanity,
and but for the cruelty of indi.criminating
charity the shoeless infant singers would
soon cease to be common objects of English
streets in winter.

THOSE men of merry Devon showed so-ne
of their old sturdy spirit at Plymouth when
they 'threw the day's delivery of "white
salmon" from Newlyn and St. Ives into the
sea, smarting under the sense of wrong done
to their fisher craft by the Coruishmen. The
scene recalls that other bigger picture of
Boston Harbour and its covering of taxed
tea, scattered by the beginners of free
Col im bia over all the wide expanse of
sheltered water. The Plymon h men appear
to have cause of complaint that their home
industry is handicapped by the importation
of hake in quantities from the Cornish
coasts, especially as the salesmen and mer-
chants have decreed that the fish from a
,liita.nce shall be sold first ever:, morning
before those caught within hail of Plymouth
come under the auctioneer's hammer. The
Plymouth fishers, despairing of justice -with-
out first resorting to pronounced action, gave
bac: to the sea some fourteen tons of fish,
and now the battle as between the interests
of impo!•ters and townsmen is to be tough!
-alt to the end What the Plymouth men oi
line and net most object to is that, besides
• being forestalled in the home market, the i•
are unfairly treated by reason of thir
Cornish competitors being allowed to sell
hcir tish in the great S mth Dzven t0w..1
without toiler due; while no Devo-nian
fisherman may land his haul in the pas 9!
the county of Tre, Pol, and Pen unless h
first pays tribute in tho way of heavy land-
ing- fees The Plymouth fisherman wants
reciprocity with his free trade.

" :r!end recommended St. Jacobs Ah
thlt wa.4a fri .nd in need w.rich wag a friend

E ,CO.4,.—GKATICFUL AND COMRORTING.—"By ,
lior 'ugh kno.vledge of the natural laws which goer
he iperations of digestion and nutrition, and by care-
scatioa of the line properties of well-sarcte
,r. pps has provided our breakfast tables wicl
a de:icately flavoured beverage which may save u
ma ye ivy doctors' bills. ;t is by the judicious use of
such ztrtieles of diet that a constitution may be grada -
rely Ludt tip uoti; strong e,.ough to resist every lend
eocy to . nisease lluudreds of subtle maladies at-
-
log nounilS re Lily to attack- wberevei there is a
p,mit A 0 ma, escape many a fat...i shaft b.:
,• , urselyes wed fortiiied with pure blood and a
• 1..• nourist:ed iraiae." (Jim/ streice Gie
aith bialin r g wate or milk. Sold onl! in
•,•,;ets , JAAIE3 r.rys Jr Co., Homceopatlu
milers ef Epcs's Afterneo
i;ata s.etA:e.

s tranii!icn from heat 5
, (411, o• truin ra 4\- i clement we itin.r to op;,rts:4•4:.:
halts el, favoor th dev-lcp :tent ot inanifuld 4i;s
age-, whizd ur..ty io in, IFICit C.c.s be cheap:Cl A ,
endered as rtiie by an 4 3 ly tes4;l tto these FL 1; ;
.g, regulating, and stren 44aniog P 1.. Thi It
OWII and hi.±lily estzei. t rattd:cine affo:da .
tor altncis! ev x, cousiLutiuLal N..roag
v: 'itch unhealthy clinntt•F, rapid cbange3, or diatic
•:r is cn engender, and effect uully ren:oves any
akn s self-indulgent habits uhty av e iAiuce i.
Ii hit con !iiioenz o tistt sy. tam bordtrin4 on tt.sease
„Lich 118 io indicated by al_Qtliy, listles_nesi, and
wi.l ploys espc ea 1,
.t.: ic• able in begt.t.ng tte vivacity of thiud rind
4pitoistea by but:, eJuud and bick,