Norfolk Is. Eagerly Awaits Capt. Pinney.

From Our Own Correspondent.

Norfolk Is., July 2.

COLONEL BENNETT duly departed

by the last steamer out to Sydney and the time is drawing near when we shall welcome his successor, Capt.

C. R. Pinney, to the island..

He is due to arrive on the “Morinda,” reaching here about the middle of July, and the greatest excitement prevails among those whose social life revolves around “Government House,” as “The Residency” is erroneously known.

We will all be satisfied to discover a keen, capable man of affairs with the necessary qualifications for his post, and an upright figure on the Bench, where he sits alone in judgment. And we shall be anxious to know if we may expect to find him every day in the office in the heart of Kingston, where all administrators, prior to Colonel Bennett, might be found —or, if not the administrator himself, under stress of other business, then his secretary and deputy.

For the last three years, anyone with business to transact has been required to cross the reserve, pass up through the G.H. ground, around to the side of the building and mount the steps to the private secretary’s private office, where pleas would be heard.

Satisfactory Shipments Of

Fruit.

Our last shipments of fruit to Aus tralia have realised quite satisfactory

prices and certainly we have estab lished ourselves as a banana producing island on the map of the Pacific, for, by every inward mail, we receive let ters from new merchants on the other side asking for local agents to buy and ship for them. We are, admit tedly, at the extreme edge of the ban ana belt, so to classify it, but, for the first four months of the year, our ban anas compare favourably with those grown anywhere between here and the Equator.

But, of course, our real future lies in tourist traffic and the establishing of homes here by retired business men with small, settled incomes and a pas sion for open-air games all the year round. And invalids and convalescents, also, will undoubtedly flock here in years to come; sent here by their medical men or lured of their own commonsense on realising our magnifi cent, health-giving climate and the charm of our solitude and beauty. We shall build a sanatorium some day on the slopes of Mount Pitt —warm in win ter, cool in summer, sheltered by the bush-clad shoulders of the mountain from the ruder onslaughts of the brac ing sea breezes, and facing always the blue, eternal ocean.

The Pacific Aerial Transport Co., one of the transport companies on the New Guinea goldfields, has now three ’planes in commission and hopes soon to have a fourth.