GOLD BRICKLAYERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 302, 21 December 1932, Page 6

GOLD BRICKLAYERS.

There arc certain trades not susceptible to progress; static, 'because there is no need for their practitioners to 'keeip up with the times (writes Helen Simpson in the "Spectator"). Their rules are clear and invariable, having sure foundations in tlie tenebrous deeps of human .nature. Even the quack doctor a;nd the fortune-teller nowadays must gloze their performances with a little of the more easily procured scientific verbiage. But the confidence man goes 'his unchanging way, and the confidence infant learns at ite mother's knee the old half-dozen dodges' that are to be an income to it through life.

These dodges are older than anybody can calculate; they represent the trickster's gamut, all he knows on earth and all he needs to know, though the variants are numberless. The human qualities on which he plays, and can always depend, are three —conceit, cupidity and. credulity: these are the properties of his show, which he adorns with patter. But it is pretty to see how the tricks themselves stand four-square on their own merit, independent of the performer; a gold brick can almost sell itself by now. Infinitely various, they are eternally unchanged, opposing to custom and age not variety but an unwithered sameness. "On Tuesday, before the Commissary of Police" (I translate from a French paper), "M. Machin, retired cultivator, complained that two individuals had defrauded him of tfrs. 1200. It appears that the former, a newcomer to Paris, picked up and returned a rosary dropped in the street by one of the personages. Subsequently a visit was made to a cafe, where in due course the tootrusting cultivator was devalise." This is in the 'best tradition. The dialogue is entirely simple to imagine. "Yours, I think, 'monsieur?" "Hein?" A glance at the restored object, astonishment, rapture. "My mother's rosary! You laugh, monsieur, 'but I wouldn't lose that roeary for a thousand. Here's a cafe; you'll allow me to offer you a drink? I can't express my obligation " And then, perhaps ihalf an ihour later: "You might care for a game—dominoes, ipoker? Just to pass the time. It's long, the time, even in. Paris, when one is alone." Turning from the rather cynical French account, which seems to suggest that the whole affair was the victim's fault, I find a similar recital in a book called "The New Cheats of London Exposed," published somewhere about 17C0. Here the author's intent is to warn, which he does by describing with great exactness and a good deal of interspersed piety the temptations and snares to which too-trusting, cultivators lay themselves open. After chapters on Trappers, Kid-Layers, Scamps (a strangely mild term for (highwaymen), and Duffers (>pseudo-smugglers), he comes to those professionals of cheating known as Money-Droppers, who are none other than the astute individuals of M. Machin'e misadventure.