THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 205, 31 August 1933, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.) Wee, small Henri has had the measles. Very proud of them he has been, but is rather glad now he is spotless and school looms pleasantly in the near THE CHILD MIND, distance. He was, of course, a little feverish and disturbed during his sickness. His father one morning asked Henri what sort of a night he had had. "I couldn't sleep, dad —I stayed awake all night. I heard the milkman come. I heard his watering can rattling." In the mattei**of the Ruawai fleas and the suggestion that the Northern Wairoa district be top-dressed with insect powder, an old subscriber looks in to reTHE LAST HOPE, tail the story of the oldtime melodrama. The play had gone as far as the fifth or sixth act and the villain was in despair. Striding about with his beetling brows lowering at the audience, his clenched fists shaking at the firmament, and a hiss escaping from him, he howled—speaking of the hero—"l cannot — ha! ha!—kill him. I have thrown him into the foundry furnace, I have poured him over the stark cliff into the sea, I have blown up his humble home, I have poisoned his lemonade, I have forwarded per pre-paid post to his hotel an infernal machine arranged to blow him up at meal time —I have stabbed him in the dark—yet, yet he lives!" Then came a voice from the "gods," "Hi, governor—'ave you tried inseck powder?"

Dear M.A.T., —Your amusing paragraph of the camel and horse stampede recalls the old .Eastern legend) well known to many, possibly, purporting to exSTAMPEDE. plain the instinctive aversion shown by the horse towards the camel. When Allah was creating the animals, so the story goes, the horse, fresh from the hands of his Maker, stood admiring the reflection of his comely proportions in the clear water of a lake. "How round and graceful are my limbs," said lie in delight; "how smooth and strong my neck! Yet, oh, Allah, would not tliey be yet more beautiful were they both a trifle longer? And since lam destined, it seems, to carry men and burdens on my back, would it not be well to place a saddle already there for use when required?" "Thou shalt have thy wish," answered Allah, and, behold! the ungainly camel stood there, with his disproportionately long neck and legs, and the hump, on which all burdens were to be carried, in place "upon his back. "See thyself as thou wouldst be," said Allah sternly to the horse, "and be content with what thou art." The horse gave one look and shrank away shuddering, and since that time, according to the legend, no horse can bear the sight of a camel.—F.B.F. i

Prattling of camels, which horses abominate, neck, hump, pads and perfume, there are many other creatures the neddy refuses to regard as a bosom pal "MAGNOON." —especially when seen for the first time. If an Auckland horse of the year 1900 could come back from the happy hunting grounds—where there are no spurs, totalisators or touts—and was again introduced to Queen Street, he would provide an unthinkable problem to the traffic cops. Less than that time ago a circus trundled down an Auckland street, led by a very large and extremely able elephant. A horse which had probably spent a happy foalhood alongside a railway, undisturbed by the clatter of the iron road, took one glance at the gigantic liathi. He snorted, threw himself into a pirouette, broke his tug chains, and fell dead. The circus people hitched the hatlii to the dead horse and dragged him away. The elephant wasn't in the least disturbed. He had frightened horses to death before. Reverting momentarily to the oont, camel, dromedary, etc., no spectacle is more terrific than a magnoon bull camel. He becomes a killer. He blows bubbly things from his nose, he can bite like a tiger and kick as no living beast can kick. Mere men streak for the trees in the oasis when he is on the warpath. If any man was foolish enough to be perched on the back of a magnoon oont the desert caricature would try to eat his rider's leg or seraph him off the top with a hind foot. No one yet has praised or cursed the ship of the desert adequately —except perhaps a hundred-per-cent Aussie of the Camel Corps.

Periodically noted with alarm, and the requisite shudders, that boys are buzzing about on trolleys—the box of commerce set on wobbly wheels at half-a-crown a MENACES. set and guided by a bridle of rope, twine, string, wire—and boy. These lads, one takes it, are the cool, calm bus drivers of the future, extraordinarily skilled and never—or hardly ever—victims of street accidents. They perform the more or less valuable function of compelling drivers of larger vehicles to drive carefully. Quaint thing about these trolleys is that the alarm is periodical. A thousand kerosene boxes on wheels thread their tortuous way along the roads for a year or two. No "Father of Ten" or "What a Clatter!" complains. Suddenly the season for the largest pumpkin, or the first clematis or the menace to traffic comes round, and gentlemen whose beauty sleep has been disturbed by these clamant four-inch wheels (but not by the five-feet diameter ditto) become peeved, become oratorical, become literary. Boys (the complainants were never boys) continue to be boys, and short of a trained inspector per boy, the menace remains unscotched. In innumerable cases the trolley is a vehicle of the highest domestic importance—it is little Jimmy's pram, it often brings the groceries home triumphantly, it will be found wherever there is firewood to be gleaned, it is the weed carrier of the suburban garden, the RollsRoyce of its proud young owner—the dread of the adult driver. It will be a menace for several weeks until Alsatians,., early strawberries or gigantic kumaras again obscure the mental horizon—then no more trolley menace till 1934. ' i

•If you could waft Maeterlinck into a modern apiary you'd be astonished to find how little he knew about bees, the wee devils with the sting and a passion BREED BIGGER for gathering more honey BEES, than they can eat. Honey bees are pretty good workers among white clover and expert pollinators of the same, so that we have a continuation of white clover as per schedule. The bee, however, is apparently a poor politician—he lacks tongue. The regulation bee tongue is long enough for white clover, but too short for red clover—the corolla tubes are too long, and_ the busy bee can't reach them. The obvious job in front of scientists and apiarists was to give 'em tongue. The business of producing more tongue in bees engaged the highbrows, and now it has been found that where humble bees and other pollinating insects have become extinct in red clover crops, the short-tongued bee has browsed around the red clover, producing seed to burn, showing that tongue or no tongue all's well with the world. All the same, the brainy lads are after the bee with a science manual in both hands and a mask over the face. They hope to improve the bee, so that he will live longer, produce more honey than ever—although the queen doesn't know what to do with what her subjects now bring in—and to beget a bee with a tongue long enough to reach the deepest well of honey in the most cavernous blossom. The slogan goes forth "Breed Bigger Bees''—and many apiarists are already deep in the intricacies of H. G. Wells' "Food of the Gods." . . .