THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 68, 21 March 1934, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAW ABOUT TOWN.) Cloud merchants, flying over Darkest Africa, must have gas, petrol, benzine, distillate or something to make the propeller whirl. So a great company reTHE WATER cently hired, a long train -PARTY, of husky black boys to carry petrol into the heart of Africa to establish a depot for flyers. Every one of the boys (who cost the company a penny per head a month in wages) carried two tins —eight gallons each—for forty-one days. When this feat of transport was over the big white baas of the party tested a tin in a benzine lamp and found it was excellent —water. Inquiries ensued. The lead boy at the beginning of the trek had fallen over a rock and burst a tin. The benzine to him and the other boys looked just like water so the whole 6f the pack train of one hundred and twenty carriers, each with eight gallons, emptied the tins and carried them empty until they got to the last creek before reaching the depot. Then they filled thAi all up with water. It was the white man in charge of the outfit who told the story when he got to Australia. It would, of course, be interesting to know if the innocent darkies soldered the tins of water —still one shouldn't be captious.

The history of New Zealand's charms has been added to by the slaying of a twenty-one point red deer with black horns and everything to match. The fortunate TWENTY-ONE gentleman who took a POINTS, chance when aligning his

sights of getting a blue deer or a pink deer with only four points is to be highly congratulated. This passion for collecting corpses as evidence of one's love for animals and natural history is inherent in human beings. One may bla: le the collector of a four-ton elephant for the sake of his two front teeth, but one nevertheless envies him. It leads to the charming memory that the highest form of human sport is, after all, collecting human specimens. How pathetically uninteresting seems the pastime of collecting deer heads when in a more sporting community— eay, in Borneo or New Guinea or elsewhere —a man could spend delightful holidays stalking the handsomest gents and adding their he ids to the decorations of the family hut. You can imagine the gentleman with the poisoned dart and the blowpipe stalking another gent all day, and, after killing him, hoping he'd have a fine specimen head, finding that he had two teeth out or a squinting eve, or a bald spot—not a twentyone pointer at all, dash it!

A confirmed bus passenger of advancing age has nvade a discovery. He declares that it is easier for him to stare through the bus

windows at the common THE TELESCOPIC objects of every day than WINDOW. to' stare at the same while

trotting around on his boots. Wherefore he concludes that the ordinary bus window and railway carriage window* has a slight magnification of objects seen through it. He was evidently unaware, however, that special breeds of eight-seeing buses are already common on the Continent, where the proportion of short-sighited people appears to be even greater than the proportion in this far-seeing country. Thus shortsighted tourists, catching special telescopic buses, are able to dispense with their spectacles and return to the hotel, under the impression that Mont Blanc is a much larger hill than Mr. Baedeker gives it credit for being, and that the people of Switzerland and orther countries are all Sons of Anak. The idea of magnification for the glass windscreens of the common car is not without •utility. A driver with defective eyesight, aided by his telescopic window, might justly claim, having maimed a pedestrian five feet two in his shoes, that he was in fact a sixfooter, and boast of his kill to his friends for years and years, just as a man prattles of his twenty-five-point stag or his ton-and-a-half shark. A general commercial system of magnification by vision is indicated. The new Continental bus-glass, utilised in shop windows, for instance, would easily induce the customer to believe that eight ounces are one pound. It would stimulate trade appreciably and help the country round the corner.

Street toilettes in these regenerate days are commonplace. A lady will halt in front of a shop window or before a wayside mirror to sub-edit her eyebrows, GLASS OF put new high lights in her FASHION, eyes, dab a bit of poudre

d'amour on her nose, or twirl up the drake tails on her neck in the approved style. Nobody minds, and this thing is going further. All the new London flats, New York flats, Berlin, Paris and Warsaw flats, have mirrors in every entrance door, so that visitors standing on the mat waiting for the maid to cry "Entrez, messieurs et madames," are able to see themselves as others sec them and adjust their appearance. Maybe you think that this is a new beauty stunt, but as a matter of fact these are merely regenerate days. In good Queen Victoria's royal days all swell clubs and other gorgeous places hiding behind doors had mirror panels so that the gents with the Dundreary whiskers could give them an extra curl before passing inside. And by the way, there is a Carlton Club in Melbourne that years ago was reconstructed on modern plans. The whisker glasses on the front doors are still there, however, as relics of the day when men wore strapped pants, ambrosial whiskers and padded shoulders. Do not therefore be angry with the office boy who, while listening to your—ah —orders—whiles away the passing moments with a pocket comb and a piece of mirror, or get peeved with the lady amanuensis who lefthandedly dabs her countenance with a pink pad while taking a shorthand note with the unencumbered right.

In England several spinsters are revolting as usual, telling mere man unpleasant things about himself, while mum of the home fires smiles gently and carries THE COFFEE ou with th*e> bairns and DEBAUCH, the cooking—using the

still, small voice of universal command in kitchen and drawing room. It is cabled that Miss Dorothy Evans has exclaimed, "Go to the cafes and restaurants about 11 p.m., and you will find them filled with men drinking coffee. You will find few women." The inference is various. First, that these iniquitous men ought to be jolly well ashamed of themselves for being coffee drinkers; second, that if they drink coffee women should drink coffee, too; and, third, if you find men drinking coffee by themselves without the saving presence of ladies, the country is doing to the demnition bow-wows. If, on "the other hand, you find two score of ladies gathered together drinking tea on their own, unaccompanied by man, and discussing every subject 011 earth from servants to infants, you gather that the country rvoin" to the how-wows at all and that alls welirthe mothers still are rocking the cradles of the world." As a matter of fact, both normal women and ditto men instinctively hive off at suitable times and find it very natural and comforting. Men don t barge into the female departments; normal women refrain from endeavouring to join those societies, clubs and what not sacred to men, and society generally is firmly based on the age-old habit that there are times and seasons when collections of one sex are instinctively segregated by common consent from the other. Still, if these callous wretches of men still persist in "Men Only" at coffee riots, something will have to be done. Women (and men) will always continue to suffer —at conferences.