THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 81, 7 April 1931, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

Here is a good action photograph in a great London paper of Ireland beating .England at football and at Twickenham. The referee is easily seen. No COSTUME PLAY, footballer would think of

kicking the referee instead of the ball. He dresses the part. He is attired in a long, striped garment. He wears a high, white collar and an immaculate tie. He is the only bald-headed man present. He is running in a most respectable middle-aged manner, his head well up, his lips carefully closed in the orthodox manner, his hands doubled and held tight to the sides, his whole •appearance bespeaking that degree of respectability that made cricket in the old days impossible without froek coats and high silk hats. A depraved New Zealand footballer, shown the picture, says that the clericallooking referee could be instantly transferred to a pulpit with perfect propriety, but admits that among clericals there have been some bobby dazzlers, specially mentioning that much-remembered' light-weight football wonder, the Rev. Mr. Mullineux. There is no iloubt that dressing the part adds to the joy cf sport. For instance, how utterly contemptille is the small boy with the tea-tree fishing red and the and seventeen fat fish alongside the carefully-attired adult aristocrat with fifty guineas' worth of gear, waders, creels, a license and two four-ounce fish.

If this column was a London column you couldn't get into it, my lad, you not being a marquis, or even a Prime Minister. The London paragraph sleuth FAME! dines with dukes, plays

golf with marquises, goes hunting with earls and bangs billiards with barons. Yes! One of M.A.T.'s London compters has lately conferred undying distinction on Stanley Baldwin, that fine old English gentleman. He eat alongside The Man that was annoyed with a newspaper in a dining room, the idea being to show the reader that the par. sleuth is of high rank himself. He makes no bones about saying (in English, too!) that Mr. Baldwin was reading a detective yarn propped up against a cruet. That is the thrilling news the word weaver gives to the world, and the thing the obscure colonial must admire most is the social standing of a verb spinner who is permitted to sit in the seats (or next to the seats) of the mighty. Orfe wonders if Mr. Baldwin went away without knowing the sleuth, or if the sleuth tracked Mr. Baldwin to his lair, his fountain pen eager to immortalise him; and then one went out into the city hoping against hope to run down Mr.- Forbes and thus immortalise both the writer and the Premier. By the way, M.A.T. once visited a town in which only six days previously a prize fighter had been staying. -

A globe trotter, having read the paragraph mentioning the Japanese method of "shooting" ducks with a butterfly net and then releasing them, says that other OLD NIPPON. Japanese liabits might be

transplanted with benefit. Our own superior people, he avers, clutter their homes up with a vast accumulation of things that are not necessary. One cannons off articles of furniture that are rarely used and shakes showers of objeta de vertu from every occasional table. He himself has removed his shoes before entering the palatial residence of a Japanese gentlemanj to find that most of t,he rooms were (from a New Zealand point of view) empty. If a Japanese gentleman has an article he specially prizes he gives it a room to itself. His artistic idea is that a rare object is too precious to be lost in an impenetrable forest of utilitarian furniture. A Japanese room with one precious object in it can be instantly made into a sleeping chamber by just dragging in a mat and a jiJow. The lesser folk of Japan when they are moving house do not hire pantechnicons, vast lorries or a corps of furniture destroyers. Pa, ma and the children take the lot on their backs. These flittings" are infrequent, but where a humble Japanese desires to put on a bit of swank he moves from the house that cost him ninepence a week and blossoms forth into a shilling a week mansion. The hirepurchase system has not Jet seriously invaded Old Nippon, but a lot of Americans are in Japan—and one never knows.

Two illuminating cablegrams. New York poor at Easter time paraded in their raggedest clothes while the rich were emerging from church. The poor dressed RICH AND POOR, in smashed opera hats

and swung canes in derision and in imitation of the opulent, who were amused, but apparently didn't rise to the occasion, awarding dollars. The other cablegram calls attention to the parade of beggars in Spain in order that, after they had been carefully bathed and disinfected, King Alphonso could kiss their feet in a kingly gesture of humility. One feels that if Alphonso had a job to go to other than the one he now performs he would swap with any of the beggars whose feet he kissed. Too much is said of the misfortunes of the poor and too little of the miseries of the rich. In Spain, for instance, as you see, a monarch with millions in the bank may at any moment become the target for an assassinj while a beggar with no income tax to pay, no crown to worry him (and no half-crown, either) may just fall in, get his feet kissed by the unhappy potentate and a handout of clothes, coin and food, all sans care and without responsibility. The agonies of the rich in the United States are too many to need recapitulation, but one of them is that a never appears to know how many millions lie possesses. In reflecting on this unhappy class, one's thoughts invariably revert to the dreadful fate of Carnegie, who was obsessed with the idea that he who dies rich dies disgraced, but who, however, did his level best to distribute much of his incredible wealth. There is no novelty in being able to obtain anything on earth. The things that are hard to get are the most prized. It is, for instance, extremely difficult for a man to have his feet kissed by a king, and it is a luxury absolutely barred to American millionaires.

The story was told herein the other day of the walking unemployed man who, coming across a lorry driver whose truck had broken down, put it in working DECENT. order, the driver depart-

ing without the man, although he was travelling the same way. Here is another. The driver was on the way to Rotorua—one hundred miles this side of it. He came across a man with a swag and stopped. The man told him he was walking to Gisborne to a job. The driver said he wished he was. going to Gisborne in order to give the pedestrian a lift all the way, but he would take him to Rotorua anvway. This he did. As they parted the driver asked the swagman if he had any money. The man had none, so the driver made him (most reluctantly) accept five shillings. The out-of-work man must have taken notice of the number of the vehicle, but possibly had some trouble in afterwards locating the motorist who had been so helpful. At any rate, some weeks later the driver received an unsigned letter from Gis-b-jrne enclosing ten shillings. That man was grateful for a decent act.

A THOUGHT FOR TO-DAY. »23 To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little, and to spend a little less, here is a *task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.— Robert Louis Stevenson.