THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 252, 25 October 1933, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.) MULTUM IN PARVO. Dear M.A.T., —Queen Street is at present a very delightful place for a lunch-hour stroll; modish misses in their new spring attire flit like so many butterflies among the sombre folk, but their marked similarity is puzzling to mere man, and has evoked, the following lines: She might be one of a hundred girls. Just a girl . . . with curls! Hat tilted jauntily, Swagger coat and swagger air. Coquettish, gay, a certain flair, Or what you will— Yet something most alluring . . . still. She might be one of a hundred girls, Just a girl . . . with curls! I pass her in the crowded street. Something familiar in the neat, Slim figure, bow of organdie (I crushed it once and she upbraided me!) — Surelv I know that double row of curls. But she might be one of a hundred pretty girls^ Noted in a cablegram relative to Parisian police methods for controlling unruly taxi and lorry drivers, that troopers of the Republican Guard occupied the paveA SET OF SHOES, ments—a slithery position for any self-respecting horse. The average city horse, hauling a load on smooth asphalt or traffic-polished concrete, has to step as carefully as a tight-rope walker —and one wonders if police horses on the Continent are nowadays rubber-tyred like cars. Recently it was advocated that New Zealand cities should have small forces of mounted police ready at a moment to dash over the asphalt or concrete to the latest riot, dog fight or soap box. A charge of smooth horses, with smooth shoes on smooth asphalt, is more dangerous to the riders and their chargers than to the crowd that is to be dispersed. _ You have only to see a horse that has slipped down on a smooth road surface trying to get up to know what kind of a handicap a modern surface is to a shod horse —it is usual to put a sack on the road for the horse to get his forefeet on. As far back as IM3, when there was an unbrotherly feeling in this city and many mounted persons held the port of Auckland, It was anticipated that horsemen might have to gallop about Queen Street—so the street was duly sanded, although the horses didn't gallop. The average citizen will be able to understand how a shod horse feels _on a shiny road surface, by contracting sciatica, achieving corns and in-growing toe-nails, filling his boots with flints and trying to run along the top wire of a fence.

The intrepid hawker carried his whole stock-in-trade in one of those • natty nearleather cases usually sold to working young ladies who have no pocGREEK MEETS kets to stow a packet GREEK. lunch in. Apart from the little lunch case he carried a line of talk. With a flourish that Maurice Chevalier might have envied, he snapped open ' the lunch case as the lady of a Blue Lynn house answered the insistent clang of the doorbell, and, exhibiting a one by two inch package, broke into prose poetry, after each verse of which the lady interpolated, "No, thank you, I don't want any." Breaking into the fifth stanza, the gentleman asserted that he had invented it, that it would take stains out of anything. If the lady would drop hot fat over her best silk dress he would demonstrate free gratis and for nothing its superlative qualities. She repeated the recitative "I don't want it. I've seen it before. I don't want any, thank you"—and began to close the door. The salesman chanted a prose ode, remarking that she couldn't have seen it elsewhere, because ho was the discoverer. "I've seen it at Home," said she. "How much is it a packet?" "One shilling, lady," sangtho chapman. "It's a penny at Home," responded the lady. "Ah doot, leddie, ye're Scots!" said the awed hawker. "I am," said the lady. "Ah'm Scots, ma'sel'," moaned the man with the lunch case, snapping it shut, "so I'll no waste your time—and mine," and headed for the Irish quarter. Dear old Spengler! Ho is the German Herr Doktor who has noted (with several citizens of the reign of James 1., the first Duke of Wellington and THE the chairman of the WaiANCIENT ICICLE, pakaruru Road Board) that England is decaying. Dear old Speng. apparently bases his hopes of another war (in which Britain' will naturally be beaten) on the fact that pacifist resolutions were passed by some Oxford undergraduates, who, if the war happens while these pacifists are young enough to go, will as usual be there with both feet. In our own small way we in New Zealand saw the pacifist in C.O. camps during the war. All ,vere intractable squabblers who fought principles and each other, and who ultimately in so many cases fought with the usual weapons of the soldier. Old Speng. says in his "England decaying yarn" that "her youngsters have become soft, making sport of eroticism and a profession of sport." The softies were' just like that in 1815 and in 1914, kicking footballs over the top, playing tin whistles in tight places, and singing the Hymn of Hate as a comic song. Dear old Speng. is here spoken of because he is the typical old pessimist of every age who believes the young people are not what they were "when I was a -boy"—as if youth generally changed in type, in spirit or in adventure in a mere twenty years or so. Even ancient admirals and crusted generals bemoan the decadence of modern youth—and write crabby books about the mistakes of others when they themselves are no longer fit to scrap. To the ancient has-been youth is always wrong—until youth has to harness up again. Then youth is always right—until the war is over and the profits divided among the has-beens. If Speng. is about after the next war he's bound to lift a good div. while Private Fritz is tailing on for his pension of ten pfennigs a day.

It lias been thoughtfully said by scientists with altitudinous brows that man's ultimate fight for possession of this earth will be with the insects, which are inTHE BIRTH eradicable and usually in PROBLEM, excellent health, competent to carry on the insectivorous races. Science fights one insect scourge by warring 011 it With another insect seourago, which at once bears the beautiful thought that all Nature is perpetually at war. The military formation of uncounted caterpillar hosts in the Asliburton district, which are mopping up the country just like Christian armies will remind wanderers of ants and locusts and other army corps which were in action before Adam wore his first breeks and are marching yet. The ant particularly as a determined devastator will fill the eye of the watcher. He marches in massed battalions with scouts and flankers and generals and all the paraphernalia of war —and he gets there over the bodies of the slain or the burnt or the -conscientious objectors. Caterpillars will stop a train—or a caterpillar tractor, or tank—and will survive and come up wriggling when supposed to be dead and buried. Naturalists never tell us why, during one season, mice, caterpillars, locusts, etc., are in ordinary supply and in another in uncountable myriads miles and miles in extent and in battalions billions strong. Where does this sudden alarming fecundity, this miracle of gestation, this phenomenal and not understood fertility, come from? You can only begin to appreciate it by imagining millions of human births in an earth that previously had mere hundreds, when you would have mothers inviting their lady friends to "Come round and see my forty new babies—thirty boys and ten girls—and [father on relief work!"