THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 241, 11 October 1934, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.) A matured gentleman of blameless appearance has admitted with chuckles that as a small boy he was a young devil; and all men, if honest, admit « WILL that all boys are young BE BOYS." devils who become apparent saints later because thev are dragooned by common consent into unnatural goodness. He said that lads go through a complete series of devilment, exhibiting primal traits, however saintly their parents mav be. He then suggested the registration "at the Arms Registry Department of all spectacles, on the ground that lie naa recently come across a bunch of boys, all with lenses taken from spectacles, who were trying to light cigarettes with them by focusing strong sunlight on the tips. One boy had, he ascertained, been highly successful with his sun-rav treatment and had set fire to a heap of waste paper under the sunny corner of his dear old home. A terrified mother had with difficulty extinguished "the incipient conflagration." The .observer added that he had never known any boy in normal health who vearned, to be gocxl —and the little saints of all fiction were dear little souls who died of wasting diseases. All his young sons and nephews craved to be Indians, gunmen and pirates. Only one boy wanted to be a company promoter —and he was sixteen. He concluded by saying that all boys love the story of George Washington—not because he couldn t tell a Tie, but because he destroyed a tree. Eric of "Little By Little" wouldn't have told a lie, because he wouldn't have been boy enough to chop the tree down.

Deference to formal ritual proscribes that armed men should guard a royal bier. It is cabled that the body of the assassinated King of Yugoslavia "was flanked GRAVE by two guards with FORMALITIES, sabres raised in motion-

less salute," and it is interesting to reflect how long any human bein<? caji stand motionless in an unnatural position without collapse. To the average citizen even the two minutes* silence of Armistice is so trying that many have been known to faint during the short ordeal. It is common enough for men of trained military units to fall to the ground at protracted inspection, when men have to keep one rigid attitude. On a New Zealand occasion, while politicians palavered troops about to depart out of the country, at least twelve men fell in the ranks while the. statesmen boomed —and went on booming. Young cadets are notoriously good faintors in times of formal movelessness, and even a British Guardsman, trained to the mechanical stability of a wooden man, has been known to collapse. Those who have noted the uncanny stillness of British Life Guards —horses and all —at Whitehall have often wondered how it is possible. It is in fact ordeal by torture. One remembers only one occasion when a person of high rank for whom troops stood to attention while being addressed asked that these suffering fellows should lie clown—and lie down they did while the politicians raved. For some years two gigantic Zulus guarded the tomb of Cecil Rhodes on the Matoppas, but these guards went loony iso often that other more humane methods of ibeing formal were adopted.

The snatching or rifling of the universal handbag, daintily done in selected leathers and zipp-fastcned, provoked the comments of grannie, who, riding 011 a MAMA'S mental broomstick baekPOCKETS. wards through the

decades, said that there would be no bag-snatching if women • wore pockets. She minds the time when a woman s dress weighed not» two ounces but twenty pounds and when in the detachable skirt was concealed a 'pocket deep as a Mondip mine in which she might carry anything from the vegetables for dinner to a thimble for sewing. These cavernous pockets, according to gran, were practically terra incognito to the children, who, dive as they might, generally miescd the pocket and struck the placquet (is "plac?quct" right?). Women did carry bags even in Victoria's reign, but the skirt pocket was the real standby. Grannie did not pretend that she desired to go back to pocket days, hadn't the slightest desire for a muff the' size of a retriever dog with a "hotbox" inside to keep the gloved-fingers warm, and thinks that the respirators everybody wore to keep the cold air out were slightly overdone. She .remembers that responsible men with mutton-chop whiskers and padded frock coats used to wear gold watches 011 heavy cables with an expanding arrangement in the watch pocket that would cling to the pocket when the pickpocket pulled the guard —damaging the pocket but retaining the v. "tch. She even told the story of the retired Guardsman who was walking in Hyde Park, lie had been the' heavy-weight champion of "the Heavies" and. was stuck up by a sinister Sikes with a chili, keen on a gold watch. "Could ye tell md the time, guvnor?" asked Sikes. "One!" said the licavy-weiglit, and smote him 011 the Jaw.

Dear M.A.T.,—Countless people arc aware of the tremendous importance attached in the East to vellow as a colour. It is the colour;

lof holiness and sanctity. I CHOOSE A Lave just read a cutting COLOUR, jfroni a newspaper which •contains the record of sonic almost startling discoveries by a scientist as to the attraction which various colours have for mosquitoes, which, as everybody knows, are from thd devil. The scientist, the late Sir Arthur Sliipton, _ placed in a large gauze cubicle tent, in which he breu mosquitoes, a pile of cardboard boxes, seventeen in number, and eaoii lined with a different coloured cloth. The lids were kept open. The boxes were put in rows, one above another, and the order was changed each day, so that no question of height from the floor or better illumination entered into the problem. Counts were made of the inhabitants of each box on each of seventeen coiirsccutive days, the results proving that yellow is odious to mosquitoes. We might yet arrive at some kind of colour scheme which will keep all insects out of a house. It is well known in Northern India that lights shaded with red fail to attract green flies, -and when these flies are invading a house in millions it> is possible to dine in comparative comfort under a red light, provided there are other (coloured lights a little distance away. A pune white light is what the insects are most drawn to, and it is amazing to see the difference in the size of the clusters round a white and a red light in the same room. I won*t say that it was discovered in the East ccmturics ago that mosquitoes keep away front yellow, and that was why yellow became the colour of holiness and sanctity.—Safdar Jang.

WHAT IS NEWS? The two citizens of stlie world sat in their suburban train. One whs reading a newspaper. He fluttered a psge, gazed at a headline, turned to his m a tie, and, said without pain, "Rotten affair, these riots in Spain, isn't it?" "Y-e-s," dreamily agreed the other. "Is that right that Harold ILogan won the Avon Handicap?"

THOUGHTS FOR TO DAX Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. —Processor \\ hitehead. The world turns aside do let any man pass who knows where he iis going.—David Starr Jordan. ■.