Hawkers

[NZBC]

An officer of the Wellington City Council tells a story of the manner in which the generosity of a thrifty housewife in the city was abused. He is a superintendent of hawkers' licenses. The housewife asked him to estimate the weight of a sack of potatoes that a hawker had sold to her. He said the weight was 801b or 90 1b. She said it had been sold to her as a hundredweight. The officer, who was once in the police force, wont after the hawker, caught him, made him weigh the potatoes, and they turned tho scale at 84 1b. A few days afterwards another hawker came round. He also had potatoes, "nice floury ones." "Be off with you," she said. "I know you hawkers. You're all of a piece. I had one here the other day, who sold me 84 1b as a hundredweight. I'll have no more of it." With a look of injured innocence, he protested that it was "the likes of that fellow that prevented honest men getting an honest living." Tho housewife relented, and the man struggled in with a sack of splendid floury potatoes. The officer lifted it, and found that it was over the hundredweight. The housewife was delighted with the splendid quality of the potatoes, as well as with the honest weight, until she had used them four rows down, when she came upon rows of rotten onions and other decaying vegetable

Taranaki Herald 18 August 1908