THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 25, 30 January 1934, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

You know the old storv of the man from the country who visited the Zoo for the first time and saw a dromedary? . "I don't 'believe there's no sieh. ammile, .WEIRD SIGHTS, said he. Mentioned herein recently the Australian "bunyip" and other fabulous animals. A London writer has now explained to 'Ms readers that as for the bunyip—there ain't no s*ch animile—a truth that has been known in the Commonwealth f»r a century or so. Mentioned, too, that another fabulous animal has been yowling round Canberra lately. Many people attributed the row to the morning son" of a stray lion, but it is now traced to the cock bustard, and fear has died down. "The Tantaloola tiger" roamed the wild in earlier davs, and put the wind up the settlers, who went looking for him with guns. A man who put a bullet through ari old man goat claims to have settled the hash of the tiger. There is a seahorse walking about in a Scots lake still. A Scotsman saw the tracks in the enow. A son of the Scot, asked if he had seen the seahorse, replied that he had not, but ho had seen its tracks, and he knew they were made by a seahorse because they looked so much like bottles.

True stories of hideous attacks by sharks on' human swimmers come commonly from Australia, and an odd shark or so will, as has been lately seen, stop SHARK! swimming sports entirely. (Even where man-eating sharks 'have failed to kill, they have often given a bather "a nasty snek." New Zealanders have always been thankful for their almost complete immunity from attacks by sharks, and the general impression seems to be that our superior sharks are so well fed naturally that thev are too lazy to go after human beings. "Sharky Bill" has been catchin>r sharks for thirty years, and no shark has ever caught Sharky Bill. Bill in private life is Captain William E. Young, an American man who has just written a book about sharks and says that the shark is the most cowardly brute under the sun or under the water. Bill says that there are hundreds of varieties of sharks and that only seven of them are man-eaters. Even these seven ferocious kinds attack man only when maddened by the smell of blood. Captain Young ackls that all you have to do to send a nastylooking shark zooming for the horizon is to wave your hand in farewell, make a noise like a politician, or splash like a soda syphon. But one of the best means of avoiding being bitten by a shark is to swim in a fresh water bath.

The average person accepts the firmament and the myriad worlds that are dotted about in it without question and regards the moon as a part of the monthly FAIR LUNA. routine, like commercial

balances or wage Fridays. No reading person doubts for a moment that there is to be a partial eclipse of the moon to-morrow morning, because he has been told so. The seers who foretell the exact moment of a lunar eclipse, the time when a new (or an old) comet is due, shout their names about less loudly- than the suburban gardener who has accepted Nature's gift of a whopping onion or a transcendent pumpkin. In earlier times the prophet who foretold the apparition of an obscured moon, or the oncoming of a comet with a long tail, would either become a medicine man of high potency or the victim of a scared population. Invariably in old times noticeable variations of the heavenly bodies were accepted as signs of coming' trouble. The old men of the tribes prescribed comets and floods, new stars and wars, old comets and pestilence—and as all three visitations have always followed stellar novelties at some time or other, the prophets have always been right—by accident. The amazing thing to the average ignoramus nowadays is that an odd genius here and there by the application of science foretells an eclipse or other abnormality much more accurately than the brightest lad foretells the first horse in an Ellerslie handicap. What is the name of the man who prophesied with absolute correctitude to-morrow's moon eclipse? One would like to give him three hearty cheers.

Those young fellows who do not remember the 'eighties, the 'nineties and other recent decades may have been interested to learn ; that it used to set a corFOREIGN NOTE, respondent back sixpence

to post a light-weight letter from these far lands to the Old Country, with ultimate concessions thereafter to twopence halfpenny—and the succeeding glorious deflation to one penny. In sixperiny times "foreign" notepaper was universal among overseas correspondents, and no doubt the rice fields worked overtime in supplying it. It was built of the utmost thinness—and by no means opaque—so that one might write voluminously and still keep within the prescribed weight. Enthusiastic scribes were in the habit of "crossing" their writing for overseas correspondence. A letter written in the ordinary way—from north to south—and then carelessly crossed with writing from east'to west over the first writing was probably the sort of training that gave us calculating boys, chess players and "bridge" builders. In the backblocks, where pens of superb finish were not common and the typewriter' had not arrived, these crossed letters were commonest, and ultimately presented problems remarkable for intricacy. The transparency of foreign paper added to the difficulties, and frantic correspondence ensued among maddened relatives who desired translation of these letters. Many modern correspondents, however, faced with the handwriting of modern youth, long for the old days of foreign notepaper and crossed writing as being more readily decipherable.

There is joyous news that a New Zealand flying officer's face, disfigured by burning, is being restored to normal appearance by a famous London plastic NEW DIALS surgeon, who is ailso a FOR OLD. New Zealander. Plastic surgery leaped forward because of the war. War doesn't mind what it does to the human frame, but when the shooting is over smashed humanity of every kind becomes unbelievably precious, and the restoration of a man whom you longed to kill yesterday became at once your job, or the surgeon's job, or the job of the army —any army. There are faces about that beam even more handsomely to-day than they did before shells, gas, bullets or fire distorted them, men wearing skulls made partially of metal, men with healthy, 'growing bone about them to which they have no natural claim, fellows with other chap's blood helping their own vital stream along, fellows with patches of new skin they never hoped to wash, and meaty blokes growing introduced muscle they could not have hoped to possess if it hadn't been for the war. One infers that surgeons, plastic and otherwise, were authorised by common consent to maximum of risk with smashed sailors or soldiers who would much rather be dead than remain hideous travesties of man, and. no doubt there are personable chaps about smiling on their fellow men, or masticating their food with synthetic jaws, who thank Providence for the enormous advance in patching humans made possible by war. It's a queer world which agrees to smash a man to bits and then longs to mend

A THOUGHT FOR TO-DAY. So many a good deed is swallowed up in contemplation.—Temple Thurston.