THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 200, 24 August 1928, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.) CLOTHES AND THE HAN. At the Supreme Court a young lady claiming one thousand pounds, alleging breach of promise of marriage by her former fiance, was awarded a sum of £250. The presiding judge, commenting on the unkempt appearance of the young gentleman, nevertheless refrained from adjourning the case while the young gentleman went out to buy a tie. Our mutual friend, Charles Dickens, said. Commenting on some cases. That much depended on their clothes And if they washed their faces. Said he, a man before the Court, His sentence might reduce One year by wearing a new suit Just as a flag of truce. The senior sergeant told the crook, "You'll get seven years, my lad, Your hair it isn't parted right. Your bow tie's rotten bad. Your hat is frayed around the brim. Your boots? Oh, what a shine! Just go and get 'em polished up, Or else he'll give ypu nine! "There's no pomatum on your locks. You haven t bad a shave. Oh, will you bally crooks not learn The way you should behave? Go have a bath! A tailor and. My word, my lad, you need 'em. For if you don't, I tell yon what. You'll never get your freedom One of the things no incinerator of tobacco can understand is the Bilence of the anti-tobac-conists. We who are going to grow tobacco in our back gardens and GOT A FILL? make a little Virginia of the North Island are aware that devoted teetotallers desire the destruction of the fruitful vine and would thus stimulate the wine trade, and are amazed that those people who do not cremate the "acrid weed" remain voiceless in this terrible impasse. The fact that seven directors of a famous tobacco corporation all became millionaires may have something to do with this silence. Where are our Carrie Xatiqns to knock the pipe from our trembling lips? Where the reformers who speak of "coffin nails" and "gaspers" and threaten death from the cigarette? If we want to boost our tobacco business it is absolutely necessary for us to have opposition, anger, meetings of protest in the Town Hall, organised parades of people who do not smoke here and therefore will not smoke hereafter. 'If Providence," said the great reformer, "intended you to smoke it would have put a chimney in your head." Down with tobacco! Let it go up in smoke!

The police at Home are going to catch motor bandits with steel-spiked mats, and very likely the charming idea will spread and a mat become part of the THE CROW'S FOOT, appointments of a constable. He could wear it in a rough-and-tumble. But it occurs to the harassed pedestrian who persists in using the earth that reduced weight mats might be carried by walkers who have an absurd desire to get home alive. The spectacle of a man laying his mat in Queen Street in order to afford himself safe passage at an intersection would charm the eye. The steel-spiked mat is, of course, an adaptation of the medieval "crow's foot," a three-pointed device which, strewed in numbers on the route of a possible charge, offered a spiked handicap to the gentlemen behind the sabre. These three-pronged devilries were revived by the German High Command in the Great War, and, sprinkled plentifully between the lines prior to a charge in the dark by the Allies, presented a problem.

There are about one million four hundred thousand people in New Zealand who are not paid a salary of three thousand five hundred pounds per year, and an OTHER MEN'S equal number of persons JOBS. who are not general manager of the New Zealand Railways. Objections will now be received from blacksmiths who do not draw the salary of a chief engineer, from carpenters who are robbed of the emoluments of an architect and from the great army of persons who confound the man who lifts a lever with the man who invented the machine of which the lever is a part. Who knows but that the new manager of railways may save the State his first year's salary in ten minutes? Who knows but that the special payment of special men will prevent the brightest New Zealanders from shouldering their portmanteaus and getting them henee to places where there is discrimination between the man on the lever and the man who controls some thousands of men with levers. When Mr. Ernest Hiley left the editing of a railway time-table at Home to become head of the New Zealand Railways he began to draw (if M.A.T. remembers rightly) the wage of fifteen hundred a year. A shriek of horror from those who would have been silent if the job had been given to them rent the blue empyrean, and when Mr. Hiley allowed the travelling public to smoke a cigarette on railway platforms (which they never did) the loud hahs-hahs said, "There y'are; I told you so, that's what he's a-doin' of for his fifteen hundred quid!" In short, the sergeantmajor thinks every field-marshal is robbing him of his job. The one objection M.A.T. has to Mr. H. H. Sterling's salary is that Mr. Sterling gets it and M.A.T. ought to be manager of the railways together with all the other people who know nothing of railways, except that the Helensville express—oh, hang that old joke*

Said tie lawyer (who confided to M.A.T. that he wished he was a farmer) over a cup of beef tea: " 'Member, I suppose, that Sir Henry Hawkins was nickA LEGAL named 'The Hanging CONFIDENCE. Judge,' although he wasn't

so slick on the taut string as Jeffries, the saint-faced judicial horror. Sir Henry was a sportsman of sorts and attended many race meetings disguised as a gentleman. In the sacred enclosure stood two lordly owners on the occasion to which I refer. Each had a horse in the forthcoming race, and they discovered rather to their horror that the jockeys' colours were so nearly identical as to deceive the public (a thing I submit, my honourable is not done on racecourses). So one lord said to the other as Sir Henrv examined his book, 1 tell you what, let your chap wear a black cap. It will be sufficient to distinguish him from my fellow.* Sir Henry, with a beaming smile like a crack in a marble tombstone, wagged his massive finger and said, 'Naughty, naughty! You don't think I carry the badge of my office with me, do you?' Then one lord turned to the other and said, 'Who is the quaint old birdT' *Oh, he is Sir Henry Hawkins.' And the other exclaimed, 'Oh, hang it!'"

Dear M.A.T., —Said the charwoman to mv wife this morning: "For the sake of our boys I hope them Waratahs ain't like their nam'e- • sake. Me mother's aunt THE WARATAHS. at had one for a pet an' it bit an' scratched like a barrerful of wildcats. When it mauled the baby, which is my second cousin and now the member of Parliament's wife, they M to drownd it."—Snag. CHAOTICS. It will be obvious to the greatest intellects that the solution to last evening's little effort was Star aliau Australia. And having reference to the persistence of this form of sport and a ream and a of Chaotics on the file, what about thist Cdhmx* yesskia.