THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 70, 23 March 1934, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

Dear M.A.T., —iRe our arboreal ancestors, the uncultured, races of India also believe that they are descended from monkeys. Bandarbansi is a term of abuse. WORD OF To the raw recruit the COMMAND, drill-havildar will politely sneer, "Tell me upon which tree were you born?" More anciently he would receive a sounding thump instead. Nowadays the native recruit is led gently in the manual exercise, taught to make a clean-cut pause between each motion, so as not to be bewildered by questions. Training was brutal in the last century in all armies and worse before. In old muzzle-loading musket times there was no sharp executive word as now. Incredible as it seems, the whole command was given in a slow, calm, level tone. Many things had to be done before Brown Bess or her •predecessors was loaded'and discharged. Flurry had to be avoided. In the Crimean War on flurried occasions muskets were found thrown down, having several charges rammed down them — but no percussion caps. You can't imagine a nowadays instructor saying, as of old, with solemn mien and stately diotion, "Take—care —that—you—handle—your—arm&r-with—pre-cision," or "Beware! The —hour —for—manual —and—firing—exercises—is—come." I have seen a recruit drop his rifle on ceremonial parade. The native soldier who had done this dreadful thing broke down and sobbed like a child. He shrank and seemed to grow smaller, his uniform sagging on him. The colour-sergeant took it very hard. He muttered one word—"Death!" It seemed to him the only possiblo penalty.—Safdar Jang.

He had retired from a strenuous business life and needed something to pass the time away. "Why not play bowls 1" asked the

wife. "What about you, THOSE COSY mum?" said he. "If you CHATS, will join the croquet club

I'll join the bowling club" —and it was even so. Mastering the initial technique of croquet and the eno-rmous volume of rules, the lady found that even more importance than the ga.me were the intermissions, when, the mallets being stacked and the troops at rest, two score members met to take tea and to indulge in cosy chats. She discovered that the rosy hours flew by on silver pinions as each lady ravished the ears of her fellow members with fascinating stories of surgical operations, pitting their own and their family ailments, symptoms and operations against rivals who claimed to have enjoyed finer hospital experiences. It was noted by the most enthusiastic claimants of prized illnesses that the new member refrained from conversation on those occasions when the air of the tearoom bristled with operations and ailments and the contemplation of illnesses ranging from ingrowing toe nails to mero measles passed tho gay afternoon. They wondered why this dumbness in a lady who was undoubtedly a good player, and discovered, to their surprise, that as she had never had the advantage of an operation in her life and had escaped illness for the same time, she had nothing whatever to add to their remarks. Herself, of course, feels somewhat de trap in being unable to claim even the most trifling triumph as a subject for surgery—can't even give 'em tt*bon mot about boils or carbuncles.

Mention in the "Star" of the "kickapoo dentist" who used to pull teeth free gratis and budkshee and sell cakes of soap at a florin a cake irrresistibly THE BAND recalls the tours in Britain PLAYED, and her colonies of the

"healer" Sequah. Sequah was a sure enough Yank, dressed in Indian buckskin togs, rushing through tho country on a six-horse coach with a band, a pair of plierß and uncountable bottles of rheumatism specific at half-a-crown a bottle. Sequah, put* ting over a rich line of patter, invited the public aboard the coach to liavo its teeth removed for nothing. The "Indian" would yank any tooth that ever grew, with a single wrench. His not to reason why, whether it was a caried molar or a perfectly sound bicuspid. When ho went for a tooth he got it—yes, sir! While ho filled the air with flying teeth the band played immensely to drown the cries of tho patients, but it was when the rheumatic cases went aboard that the band played like tho massed band* of the Guards with all tho circus bands of Empire to help. He rubbed apparently hopeless eases so hard that after ten minutes of rubbing, band and patter the patient, hitherto unable to walk, would spring up and dance a devil dance, Sequah bowing to the gratified public and inviting it to "Come right up on the inside." After he had rubbed a few cases until they were raw and redhot, tho remedy "went liko hot cakes," the cured cases hobbled away home to have some imoro rheumatism, the band played "The Star Spangled Banner," and Sequah moved to another town to shower his blessings on new material.

I am, said the man with a droop at the corners of his mouth, a scribbler by profession and inclination. I like, when I'm not

scribbling, to read what CHEER WORD, the other fellow lias to

say. I picked up a bright, cheery-looking magazine the other day, hoping for a bright, cheery hour. A sparkling little story of a business man who, going home from the office, heard a baby crying in the railway carriago and murdered its mother whom he had never before seen was the chief attraction. , Xo motive, no nothing—just plain murder. Furj ther on there was a jolly nice little yarn about the good, dear chap who was found with a seven-inch dagger stuck through him. Stone dead. Later there was a corker little thing about the Scotland Yard superintendent detective who, when there was a crime to bo seen to, went to an artist, called him "Sir" in every paragraph, sat twirling his bowler hat nervously in the artist's den, beseeching him to come along and tell him why the great merchant was poisoned and who did it.. The superintendent, sirring the amateur volubly, went away from the corpse, thanking the artist profusely. Then there was the sweet little domestic story of the man barber who got the V.C. colonel in his chair, tied him up, lathered his eyebrows, and swore to cut his throat if the colonel didn't let him marry the colonel's daughter. There was the touching tale of the South Seas, in which the stalwart young Englishman, cast ashore among the coconuts, is just in time to find the nice, white girl captive about to become a feast, for cannibals. He cleans up the group with his trusty "six," hangs his shirt on a tree, the dear old Navy in the offing sends a cutter, all hands go aboard the sloop, the captain of which is the girl's long-lost father—and so on. At the end of this message of cheer are three columns of two-line jokes r< ked from the annals of the. dim, dead past. Such sparkle—such blood!

During the past eight years I have livccl in many cities, big and small, and, 011 looking back, I find that my first impression of any

city lias always been IT ALL DEPENDS, ganged by my own afflu-

ence or prospects. I remember well my first visit to Vancouver what a godforsaken hole I thought it was, and how glad I was to get out of it. but two years later, with a few dollars jingling in my pockets and a good billet to fill, everything in the garden was m-y. T spent some of my happiest hours there. The above remarks were prompted 011 reading of Mr. G. B. Shaw. He said that he was leaving Auckland with the nicest feelings. I couldn't help feeling that I could have said something better than that if T were having a "quiet holiday" like him. —Hobo.