THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 95, 23 April 1928, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

Amazing luck those Germans had in landinp at Greenly Island in the Bremen, for was it not stated a while ago that an aeroplane might flv over New Zealand or THE NECK any other similar group OF FRITZ, of islands without seeing them. For all the terrors and tribulations of the air, the Fritres do not seem to have become particularly haggard. The islanders found it hard to supply dean linen for the crew, the greatest difficulty being in fitting the pilot, Koehl. with a collar, as he takes an eighteen. There must have been some excellent food in the Bremen and room for Herr Koehl's feet. It is usually assumed that a man who takes an eighteen collar takes twelves in boots.

"X" writes: My small brother, who is staying with relatives at a distance, is not a confirmed letter writer, and I was therefore

surprised to receive from THE CHILD. MIND, him a communication be-

ginning, "Dear , —Just a few lines to tell you how you are getting on. Could yon please send me about two hundred cigarette cards? Uncle smokes a pipe.—Your loving brother,

And a fond father writes: Mary was looking forward to a party, but the day before it she was not quite well. To her mother she said, "Do you think I'll be better in time for the party. Mother?" Mother replied, "Oh yes, I think so, if you have some dry toast and tea without sugar." And the small brother: "Can I have some wet toast, Mother? I'm not going to the party!"

In Dickens' "Household Words Magazine" for February 21, 1852, there is an anonymous article (evidently by Dickens himself) on

"Travels in Cawdor MAORI WAR Street," a London thorWEAPONS. oujrhfare that leads from

Soho to Oxford Street, and which, in Dickens' day, had many old curiosity shops. And the article contains the following quaint bit: There are small curiosity merchants in Cawdor Street as well as extensive ones whose stores resemble more the multifarious odds and ends in brokers' shops than collections of antiquity and vertu. These bring home the savage tomahawk, the New Zealand boomerang, the rosary of carved beads to the poorest door and render old armour

comprehensible to the meanest understanding." And Charles never says a word in his article about the mere of the Australian blackfellow, the taiaha of the kafiir, the piu-piu of the Eskimo or the wahaika of the Red Indian.

A finger-print bureau is being established in Auckland and will thus drive many an industrious cracksman to gloves, just as the

toe-print department, inTOEING augur a ted in China some THE MARK, thousands of years ago, drove thousands of Celestials to sandals. The late Mr. James Thorpe, a New Zealand engineer who did line nilwav work in China, once mentioned to M-A.T. while sending him a handful of Chinese "cash" with square holes in the centre, that millions of illiterates in the vast land habitually "sign their name" with the great toe of the right foot. To white officials employing thousands of coolies one coolie looks very like every other coolie and it was the custom as they dished out the weekly wage (sufficient to keep an Auckland errand boy in cigarettes for two days) to get a toe receipt from each emplovee. If a coolie, once having jriven his "sign pedal," romps round again for his .weekly eightpence, the head sprang produces the document and says, "There you are, what did I tell you?" For thousands of years, before Mr. Dinnie and Mr. Issell were with us, the toeprint as a means to criminal detection has been used in China.

Mr. C. Sims was the unhappy and eminent artist who painted a portrait of the King as if His Majesty were fifty-eight years of age (as he undoubtedly A SPEAKING was in 1924). The venom - LIKENESS, ous reception of this portrait "broke his career," and he has drowned himself. One wonders if the romantic public conception of great personages is any reason for painting portraits of them untrue to life. Now the King sixty-two years of age he is an elderlv gentleman with distinctly grey hair and beard (his face showing the tiredness his supreme office is bound to confer). But presumably if an artist painted the King as a vivacious Toung naval officer with a brown beard and a smart "cheesecutter" it would please the people if it didn t please the King. In the lesser artistic school of photography the astute camera man is aware that he must make the sitter look like the sitter wonld like to look, with all the wrinkles and the tiredness retouched out, so that even the most eminent leaders are often presented in pictures that put back the clock ten years, dye the sparse locks, brighten the dull eye.

This is the new lawn season. The fat packet under the arm of the average citizen is not sugar nor medical comforts; it is lawn

seed (or sjwrrow feed?). SUBURBAN Consider the tribulation TRAGEDY, of a suburbanite who has

toiled like a Trojan in his spare time for months to make a lawn. He trenched and dug and hoed and raked, limed, manured and sowed. And the evening arrived when the plot was as level and fine as a billiard table. He contemplated the newlysown area with a light in his eye and perspiration on his forehead. He spent Sunday watching it from the bedroom window or sitting on a kerosene case nearby with lovely pipe dreams of green sward and a new lawnmower. Providence was very good to him, the gentle rain came down and watered the seed, and on Monday morning before going to work he stood in rapt contemplation. "She's a good job," said he. The bus hooted at the top of the lane, and he sprinted wildlv, pullin" the eate to, slightly. A little later an infuriated woman, armed with a brooin, tfas seen bounding over that lawn. Two heifers were boundin** too, pitting every inch of the fair area with cloven hoofs. The man came home in the evening. He was horrified, angrv, up«et He rushed into the house. "Martha/' said he, vyho let those blinkin' things in?"' and (unconsciously relapsing into appropriate vernacular) ho shrieked, "If I knew the cow that let 'em in I a kick him!" "Kick vourself, Albert " she said more in sorrow than in anger, "you left the gate open this morning."

Cutting-up experts are as busy in the Old Country as elsewhere, and bricks, mortar and mortgages are invading peaceful scenes where RTTV Nnwi Z DCe the ni ? htin ? a le billed BUY NOW! her evening lay. A lady lately bought a piece of land, proposing to build a home, but when she began negotiations for building she found she was debarred by law from building on what was the site of an old Roman camp and therefore national property. So the judge gave her her money back and said it was a "disgraceful swindle." Which reminds one of Wellington, where, in earlier davs, there was a land boom. A piece of a large old Crown grant was subdivided by a group of ardent cutters-up, and many people, attracted by the gn prices, rushed in to see the lovely plans and to sign on the dotted line, eagerlv handin rir over their deposits. The bargains were so great that some did not even bother to see tne land. So when several of the ardent buyers went to select spots to build their charm inn suburban bungalows they found that what ooked like fiat land on the plan was a cliff ace as sheer as the side of the Aorangi. One remembers that these potential cave dwellers were informed in the circular, "Golf, fishing, bathing, magnificent views, buy now!"