THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 183, 4 August 1932, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

One of the pictorial hilarities of recent new sheets is a gigantic Loudon policeman clothed in twenty-five pounds of uniform pounding along at four BARE BOYS. miles an hour after several naked boys—a form of garb which is anathema to civic rulers and only considered decent by Nature. The average age" of these desperate young ruffians (who had been bathing on a hot day in the Serpentine) was obviously about six years, so it is but meet that the wickedness of juvenile skin should be veiled from the shocked eyes of the public. The picture serves to remind one that within a month or two our own civic authorities mav be wrestling with the age-old problem of water and beach clothing, those who don t enter, water (except in a wash bowl) being the best authorities on bathing styles, lengths and so forth. In reality the average person is not shocked at a sight of the unadorned skin of his fellow man, but he has become so exceedingly used to hearing Nature's handiwork described as indecent that he would probably vote that every bather wore an overcoat and gumboots if some advanced thinker in a borough council moved a motion on that behalf.

The bizarre, the unusual, the novel will attract all eyes. Hence the local public spectacle of a small, plain bird earning his (her or its) daily grain, is of THE OLD WHIM, much interest to all meal

I earners. The little lablourer hauls on a string, pulling his seed wagon within reach. As there is nothing to brake the wagon, the bird holds the string with a claw while it dips for its dinner, much to the admiration of human birds who earn their bread with the sweat of their faces if not by the perspiration of their feathers. The working bird, which cannot get its tucker unless it toils for it, will remind humanity of the many animals who undertake the daily round of unremitting toil for a mouthful of hay or a bite of grass. Power machinery has made the whim horse less common than he was in granny's day, and one rarely, at least in the Dominions, sees a horse plodding round his eternal circle cutting chaff or drawing water, although the East is thick with the asses which for ever circulate round the well and draw the water for the dark gentleman whose forefathers (8.C.) did exactly the same thing from the same wells. One of the quaint things about the old-time whim horse was that if for any reason an habitual circulatory gee-gee was taken from the whim and put in the plough long habit impelled him to keep on circling. In fact ploughmen using circulating horses got so tired of driving horses that would go round and round, that they let them circulate. Thus even yet you will see some fields ploughed in circles and not in straight "lands," although there are so few whim horses left in this country.

About a month ago a man was in his garden when an applicant said lie was very hard up and asked for a few hours' work, as he wanted food. He CRUELLING was given a job to trim THE PITCH, the hedge and cut the lawn, and did it very well. He was paid an amount which he said was more than he had earned and was also the recipient of a pair of trousers. The man was told to come the next week and he could do. some digging. He arrived towards evening and apologised for not getting there earlier, but asked to be shown what he had to do, saying he would be there next day. Then he asked rather diffidently if lie could get a few shillings advanced so that he might take some food home. The other, perhaps foolishly, handed him five shillings, and has never had the digging done. The evil of such a thing is that last week another man who came and asked for a job as lie wanted food was turned away. Another man was asked for a few hours' work in his store, and said if the applicant came back after dinner he could earn five shillings clearing up. That man also asked for an advance in order to buy some dinner. He w'as handed two shillings, and never came back to do the work. Even a two per cent mixture of rotters poisons the well of charity.—X.

A recent half-hearted discussion on the beauty (if any) of men compared with the beauty (and not otherwise) of women has stirred little clamour. THE However, ono man at SUPER-SOLDIER, least has admitted that there was a tradition in the war days army that men from the Dominions were of the super sort. He mentioned that during the unpleasantness the exigencies of war necessitated his reception in an Aldershot hospital. The day iftor his admission a new nurse took charge of him, and must have cared for him nicely or he wouldn't be here to tell M.A.T.,. would he? The time came when lie was much better, the nurse, conveying the medical superintendent's orders that he should be allowed to get up. He therefore emerged from the blankets, .sat on the bed, his feet on the ground, and looked at tho nurse. The nurse actually turned pale, and, as the old soldier declares, all but fainted. "Good gracious. Jinks!" she cried; "I've been imagining all along you were one of those great, big, tall, strong Anzaes," and looked frightfully disappointed to find that he was no more than five feet six and nine stone in weight. (His beauty, of course, could not be jrainsaid.) In the same hospital there was a R.H.A. driver who during his convalescence could i,ot be persuaded to lie down. In fact he sat up in bed, in imagination booted and spurred, taking his gun into action with the appropriate movement* and the necessary adjectives. Now and again the gun would stick—bogged in the mud of Flanders. A hospital orderly passing down the ward would just step over to the "gun," lift the bod at one end, let it down with a smack, and say, "There you are, all clear now!" and the driver would spur his near-side leader into the fray to "clean 'em up" again.

Now and again in a walk through our subdued suburbs, apparently silent and deserted except during the hours in which father goes to work or returns to his THE CORK bungalow, one will come FRAME, across, a reminder of Queen Victoria's reign. If you knock at the door of the house the window of which displays an enlarged photograph of a bearded man surrounded with a frame of carefully cut corks it will possibly be answered by some dear old soul who has survived the days when every cottage window displayed its treasure. Xow during a prolonged journey per shoe only every few miles will one detect the withdrawn curtain, pulled aside to show the table top decorated with artificial oranges under a glass ease, or some little piece of handiwork, the pride of the ancient members of the family. The front window exhibition now so rarely observed was in its universal days contemporary with antimacassars, horsehair sofas, side whiskers and hard-boiled shirts. Granny, thes. a buxom young matron, wore .forty-five pounds' weight of clothes and a twenty-inch waist, while grandfather, then a dashing blade, possessed a Sunday topper and a braided morning coat for occasions. The house with the frame of corks in the window is bound to have enlarged vrn.ll portraits of solemn-looking gentlemen and ladies who were photographed in IS-lo by photographers ""ho made them pose with their necks in iron frames and beeceched them not to move or laugh.