KERB COMMERCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 77, 31 March 1924, Page 7

KERB COMMERCE.

WITH WIT AS SIDELINE. A STREET SEIXER'S PATTER. "Quite a character." For years he has been one of Auckland's best known business men, and his address has been simply "the corner of the street. The life suits him and if he were to immure himself between four walls the town flaneurs would lose one of the pleasures of the stroll. From the time he sets up his diminutive stall in the gutter and discloses the greatest invention of the particular moment, until he exhausts the spending capabilities of the crowd that he quickly collects, he never stops talking. And it is not altogether the usual "Cheap Jack" kind of patter that one hears from these kerb merchants. Most of his confreres can't play long in one city; they soon exhaust their audiences. But he has been on the same pitch for twelve years. Hia patter has point; he has the knack of introducing local colour; and he seems to have an inexhaustible fund of tagends of funny verse, and jokes. Sometimes it is difficult to get a "good place" his audience being always a dozen or so deep, and even when he comes to the money part he keeps the crowd on the grin. When he hands his buyers the latest marvel of ingenuity ' for 1/ he has the knack of making them i feel that they are exceedingly luckyfellows and they look forward to the pat !on the hack the "missus" is sure to give them when they arrive home with the treasure that is going to lighten the culinary burden. Not the Whole Firm. "No, gentlemen," he says, "I'm not one of those here to-day and gone tomorrow; I'm here to-day, and gone tonight. Well, as I was about to remark, you must not think that this is our whole firm; this is only a branch. Our head office is in Christehureh, on the corner of High Street and Cashel Street. It seats 20,000 people—one at a time — and was built by the well-known brewers Hops and Co.—one beer case on top of another. This you see (glancing down at his own stand made of benzine boxes) was built by the Vacuum Oil Company. "Here, gentlemen, we have the most remarkable invention ever invented. You have seen mother and the hired help peeling potatoes like this"—(using a jack-knife). "That is not peeling; that is slicing lumps off. This little tool of mine takes off the skin thinner 'an one of Bill Massey's policy speeches. With this little gadget you can make all the sorts of chips known to the whole" school of cookery. This, the thinnest kind of all, we call "The Visitor." When your country friends come down about race-week, and do in all their good money, and want to stay round with you without showing any signs of going home, you just put on "The Visitor" chip, and your friends get the hump and hike out, or else starve to death." A Friend For Life. Without stopping talking for a moment he picks up a carrot, and shows how the invention can carve it up with the skill of a Benevenuto Cellini, and glides into "Boardinghouses, of course, don't make soup for use; they make it for profit; and we call it shadow soup; more vegetables than meat, and what's the use of buying bananas at 5d per lb to make banana salad, when with this little corer arrangement of this wonderful invention you can take the core out of all the little potatoes in the cellar, just like this" (suiting the words to action with a potato from under his stand); "slice 'em so, sprinkle 'em with butter and sugar, and the boarders won't be able to tell the difference—unless they eat 'em, and then it's 'look-out' for you." Still talking he wraps up the most wonderful invention in the world, "Of which Mr. Lloyd George said no home should be without; and Mr. Massey said, T would rather have invented that instrument than be Prime Minister of New Zealand,' and then when the demand seems to have been temporarily met he 6purs on the crowd with, "Is there any other gentteman would like to make his wife his friend "for life by making her a present of one before we go into the next department?" Going into the nex. department consists of sweeping numerous peelings into a kerosene tin, putting the rest of the greatest invention of the day underneath, and uncovering a box" of collar studs; reciting the while: "A ship without a mast A mast without a sail. But the awfullest thing That man can meet ls a shirt without a collar button." Like Jacques and the deer, the street merchant moralises the collar stud Into a thousand similes, and with quip and pathos he relates the trial, of the man ill a hurry to catch his tram, who loses his back collar stud under the dres.ing table, and then finds there isn't another in the house. "These used to be a shilling each, gentlemen; but owing to the drop in the price of butterfat last week they are now only a bob, and in view of the difficulty the country has been having with the high cost of living we have agreed (as one of the largest firms in New Zealand) to Mr. Massey's request to do all we can to keep it down as much as possible." Still talking, he wraps up one or more studs in a bit of paper, giving full directions, finds a joke in the handing over of the change, and assures his grinning circle that "I'm not here to expend hot air, nor to sell goods. What I'm here for is to prove to the people Of Auckland the number of intelligent citizens that reside in their midst."