THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 264, 8 November 1933, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

It is obvious from published accounts of unexpected windfalls to deserving New Zeaianders that the universal examination of Tasrmanian printing is justiBLANKS AND fied by results. Thus PRIZES, when you find a group of serious citizens perusing flimsy sheets, utterly covered on both sides with figures, with which they anxiously compare numbered tickets, you feel with them that to-morrow they may be buying new farms —or new tickets. Watching several men wading line by line through a sea of numbers, it became at last apparent that the group who had partnered for tickets were on the_ very edge of a first prize. Indeed, .one of the tickets was a mere one hundred out! Hardly as near a thing as the speculation of last year, when the same syndicate "drew a horse" and "won a tenner." The disgusted partners' point was that if the horse they drew had won the race they would have been ten thousand pounds to the merry, instead of a measly tenner. Life is full of hideous wrongs. You know the story of the relief worker who picked up a 'bank note in a railway train? "Jest me blinkin' luck!" he hissed. "On'y a flamin fiver!" Then at the other end of society the story of the opulent clubman. A fellow clubman to him said, "I'm awfully sorry to read that your uncle, Lord X—, 'has died. Sincere condolences, my dear fellow. I—er- —suppose he left you something, eh?" "A mere twenty thou., Y. Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead —but he was a mean old boy. What about a cocktail?"

The reunion of people after many years of separation is relatively common, and the story of the child who has been brought from Russia to again be with HER HUSBAND'S her parents in. New ZeaVOICE. land has its appeal. A recent paragraph in an English paper suggests that "Mothers of Ten," Readers' 5 and others who use pen names should come out flat-footed with their proper names. There might be a millionaire uncle aching to leave you a fortune, or dear old friends who would be glad to hear of you. A Sheffield man wrote a letter to his favourite paper about something or other, and a Rotterdam man whom he hadn't seen or heard of for thirty years wrote enclosing the sum of fifteen pounds and interest he borrowed in 1903. There are other ways, however, of finding missing friends than by writing to one's newspaper about something else. For instance, there is the substantiated story of the lady who attended a talkie show. One of the actors in the show had no sooner broken into speech than this lady rose and addressed the screen emotionally—and then fainted. On. her recovery she mentioned that the voice was undoubtedly the voice of her husband, who had deserted her many years before. It is alleged that that voice was traced to the man who owned it, and that a reunion took place. One imagines that there are wanderers on the face of the earth who shouldn't join the talkies if they want to remain undiscovered.

The renaissance of the Italian people -under the steam-hammer Mussolini, who doesn't seem to care whether a modern Air Balbus leaves r the Cabinet or not and THE ROMAN who even waves an iron HOST, mitt at Hitler, may seem, remarkable to those citizens who picture Italy as a shabby but picturesque person with a hand organ and "da monk." It is remarked by friends at Home that the seasonal irruption of Italian organgrinders into Britain, in meek commemoration of Caesar and his cohorts, no longer happens. For many generations Pietro, the missus, the bambini, da monk and the organ used to flock to Britain, gleaning enough silver to buy the winter macaroni and garlic. People gladly paid relatively large ha'pence to Pietro to drive ■him from the streets, and one could persuade him not to grind the organ for threepence. Others have regarded Italy as a place where the Camorra hangs out and sends notes embossed with a Black Hand to people ripe for the stiletto. Benito has cleaned up the Camorra, and even in the United States the Black Hand is whiter than before. Again, there was the habit of regarding the broadbacked Roman as the boss navvy of the uni-verse—-the excitable chap who sang at his work, drank wine, ate onions and toiled till the last beam faded. Very likely the Italian navvy has shovelled more dirt than anybody else on earth—and the world is spotted all over with his muscular efforts. He barged in in Queensland, and Gippsland and Tasmania and showed them how to work, to such an extent that Aussies shrieked that he be thrown out of the sugar-cane fields-of Bananaland. He did too much. He is a supremely competent engineer, he is masterly in the air, he harnesses volcanoes, makes cars that won't wear out—and he has Mussolini. Viva Italia!

From noiv henceforward the picnicker will take 'bottles containing milk, ginger beer and pink lemonade to the beaches, drink the contents, play eockshies with GLASS HARVEST, the empties, strewing the sands with enough -broken glass to lame half a townful of people. Nothing thait has ever been attempted has restrained the bottle smasher, and no one in living memory has seen a bottle smasher charged with the crime before a magistrate. Seeing that it is impossible to make any beach safe for the feet of humanity, the suggestion for manufacturing unbreakable bottles, is not without brains. One understands that the features of motorists may be preserved by sheets of' p-lass that bend but do not break on impact. What a'bout bottles that defy even the most determined beachcomber with his rocks and bottles? If the process of making glass bottles unbreakable is too expensive is there any reason why manufacturers should not return to the pre-glass era and give us those historic and even Biblical bottles made of leather? In many parts of the world even to-day the leather bottle survives. The intended bottle owner when lie kills a pig (or other animal) skins him, ties up the feet, and with the leather neck for an entrance fills the same with the wine of the country, the sour milk from the camel or even the water from the well. Cheltenham Beach dotted with people carrying pigskins full of pink lemonade would add a picturesque touch —and the feet of the proletariat would be preserved.

"M.8." writes to say that on Guy Fawkes' Sunday she wandered rather lonely in the vicinity of the Supreme Court building, her thoughts full of the hisRITS IN URBE. toric past and the eerie present, when so many suspicious characters do abound. She was startled to observe a form emerge from the shadow of the sinister pile, ' hesitate for a moment, preparing to cross the road. A constable, too, saw this unusual spectacle, his regulation stride faltered, and he watched with curious intensity the progress of the stranger across the road into the grass. No arrest followed—'for the common hedgehog is a prickly little beast. Novel as a hedgehog is in close proximity to this Hub, there is no reason why whole families of hedgehogs should not roam comfortably within fifty yards of Queen Street. Where the muchregretted (and sadly-mourned) railway station and yards stood there is luxurious grass almost Icovering the tons of broken concrete, old iron and other evidences of progress. And occasionally one observes with rustic pride a goat tethered among the broken bricks and the tall, sweet herbage, happy, as a king.