THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 172, 23 July 1929, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

5 30_WET EVENING. Night—mid the raindrops falling. Home calls . . . and tea. Somewhere a voice is bawling "Blue Skies" at: me. Crowds on the pavement pouring, Home bound as well. Crowds round tbe (ram cars waring; Jove ! this is • Light on the upturned faces, Glistening with wet. I'atience a wondrous grace is, Home calls us yet. A pipe, a seat and a paper Looks good I vow. That —and the tram bound homeward — Is paradise enow. A rush —and the car is boarded ; Scats there are none. But what does a trifle matter? The home trip's begun. Many who've not found places Chit on the pavement fret— Light on the upturned faces, Glistening with wet. —A.H. Disseminated per cablegram to a grateful Dominion clientele the face that American women in male riding garments entered Cologne Cathedral and HISTORY REPEATED, immensely shocked the vergers. It is not explained why ladies shouldn't be as reverent in trousers as in visible long silk stockings. How much garments arc allied to pietctic conduct has been emphasised in every age. In the 'eighties George du Marnier drew a picture in "Punch" of the interior of an English Cathedral. In the background is a reverent but ferocious gentleman and the verger. In the foreground are three tall damsels in long ulsters and hard masculine hats. The ferocious one is saying to the verger that he thinks it is absolutely abominable and sacreligious that young men should be within those precincts with their hats on. "Lor', sir," says the verger, "them's the dean's three daughters!" The point, of course, being that there is nothing new under the sun.

Yes, indeed. A local suspect with a couple of shanghais (rather an appropriate word at the moment), gelignite, fuse, etc., is of greater interest than the domesFAIR FIGHTING, tic affairs of the masses of Manchuria. Thus said the young man to the young woman, "What do you think of the war?" And she replied, "What war?" The young man went on to say, "I wouldn't like to fight the Chinese; they don't fight fair." And it made one think of aK the fair fighting that Christian nations undertake. Not much Marquis of Queensberry about an enemy who finds a sleeping town and drops hell on it from the clouds. Not much "live and let live" about the crowd which saps beneath an enemy and blows him to eternity while he is having forty winks. Not much cricket about the army that finds a lone outpost and a forlorn hope and shoots it man by man. A New Zealand Minister has said, in other words, that if the nations don't introduce Marquis of Queensberry rules we will have a larger war than ever some of these bright days. One of the ring rules is that you shan't hit your opponent when he's down. The whole art of modern Christian (and heathen) warfare is to kick him hardest when the referee is shouting "Nine!" Barring the ancient heathen Maoris, the habit of the nations has been to put the boot in the hardest when the prone opponent hasn't got a kick left. Many thanks to the young man who said the "Chinese don't fight fair." The Chinese are in good Christian company. The surveyor had straddled his theodolite in Queen Street, his business being to take a shot towards the sea. As it was between eight and nine o'clock morning THE THEODOLITE, he had some difficulty in getting an alignment, for the heads of the people obscured Ins view. A sympathetic policeman saw his difficulty and said, "You are finding it a hard job?" and stood in the vicinity trying to divert the stream of pedestrians. "Yes," said the surveyor, "it's pretty bad now and it will be worse before nine." The constable said, "Why don't you take the theodolite round into Fort Street. There's no crowd there!"

Gladdening to read that the efforts of the educational authorities in the future will be concentrated not so much on making children scholastic as ready for THE TOP RUNG, the life they will have to lead. Sounds all right. Experts may be able to take the small boy, gaze at his bumps, and declare, "This is the type of youth who ought to be a Minister of the Crown," and educate him in that groove. In practise nearly all the youths who make a mark were first stuck in a groove and then jumped out. The world is thick with people who didn't "stick to the last." This beautiful thought somehow made one think of John Robert Clynes, one of the brainy lads of Ramsay Mac Donald's Cabinet. If the school experts had got little Lancashire John in his infancy and said, "This lad will make a firstclass bobbin boy in a factory," John might have thought it his duty to keep on bobbin all his life. Instead, at the age of eight, he got a half-time job in a cotton factory. Out of his one-and-threepence wages he spent threepence a week in farthing dips so that he could study at night and thus enter the life not indicated by expert educationists. At the time Clynes' one book was a tattered dictionary. He began at A and swatted clean through to Z in order to get himself the only available foundation of a liberal education. Mentioned merely to refute a suggestion that the handfed lad with the largest supply of ready-made steps does not necessarily climb to the topmost rung. There was something in the life of that other Lancashire lad Seddon to suggest the same conclusion. By the way, Clynes' one physical accomplishment is Lancashire clog dancing. You may remember that Seddon's social recreation consisted in singing with immense vim "The Wearin' o' the Green."

The earthquakes in the South have emphasised the old contention that "there's no place like home." There are unhappy people whose houses have been swept HOPE. away whose strongest instinct is to go hack to the place from which a perfectly unfeeling Nature ousted them. Wo are apt to believe that the British people are par excellence the home makers, but in reality they are the one nation whose members stray farthest from the original nest. Here's a letter from Home apropos earthquakes, mentioning that the writer has recently been in Italy at a time when the King of Terrors, which destroyed Pompeii, was in eruption. The lady says: "When I was going up Vesuvius in the funicular railway I could not help admiring the pluck of the Italian people whose little homesteads with their plots of ground one saw among the lava from previous eruptions. Yet living in this terrible place they looked contented and happy. How many hundreds of homes have been swept from the side of the mountain through the ages? Hope springs eternal!" THOUGHTS FOR TO-DAY. All who joy would win Must share it. Happiness was born a twin. —Lord Byron. *« ■ • What I most prize in woman Is her affection, not her intellect; The intellect is finite; but the affections Are infinite, and cannot be exhausted. —Longfellow. You find people cheap enough to do the Samaritan without the oil and twopence.— Sydney Smith.