THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 238, 8 October 1935, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.) IVll . A 1 A.T.,—Elder brother receives instructions *to parade at scbQol dontal chnic on Saturday a. , LAST LAUGH, day!" Younger brother decides to accompany him, sits on fence outside, listens to agony, and gives the merry Ha, ha! Lady attendant fooking through window perceives antics and sends bi" boy out for little boy. Hop the chair, sonny, and let's see your teeth. Collapse of little boy, who, despite mpthers instructions, had failed to clean Ins teeth that morning.—Twelve Bar.

Birkenhead, the Cheshire town 011 the ■banks of the Mersey, is the town wlieie tli L.,,ca,1n,,-Cheshire THE OTHER head 011 the Waitemata, BIRKENHEAD, if you remember, once suggested that )t should change its name. Wonder will its namesake 011 the Mersey do so now? Old B>rk*nh«d iR more modern than most colonial towns built 011 the new P lan with great legulan y principal streets crossing at right a the same as a modern American town. They ve ,r o t about two hundred thousand pounds worth of parks. Bewildering place is Birkenhead —the docks make one's head swim, in 'fifty-seven the Birkenhead Docks amalgamated with those of Liverpool —the Mersey Docks Trust and the Harbour Board. They can some ships in the Great Float made on the site of Wallasscy Pool with ten nnles of quays. What would appear to be all the corn of the world is often gathered in enormous piles of buildings here. Many of the biggest iron ships ever floated have been built in Birkenhead, and, like its sweet little Waitemata namesake, it has several ferries —011, several. Of course, you've heard of the Mersey railway tunnel'? They've been running trains through it since 1880. There are only 120,000 people living in Birkenhead, but there are such a lot of people close by. Quite a number of Liverpudlians would turn up to see the inevitable win of Fernleaf. "The one shall be taken and the other left." A tradesman working 011 a skylight in the Hillside workshops fell seventy feet and was killed. A man who LUCK. had survived the passage of Niagara in a barrel died after slipping on a piece of fruit peeling in Auckland. A small Wellington child toddling about 011 a fourth-storey floor in a Wellington hotel fell through a glass roof on to the concrete floor of a" light well. Medical aid was instantly sought. Except for shock the child was uninjured. On the same day a lady walking down two short steps stumbled and fell, | receiving fatal injuries. Men recklessly desiring death seek it at the cannon's inouth and I return to the vicissitudes of peace, still longing j for death that will not come. Others, rather ! keen about carrying on, meet the bullet with their name on it the first day out. Makes a lot of people believe in luck or predestination. You'll meet a patchcd-up man still hobbling about with bits of foreign metal in him. Maybe he's short of pieces of bones, may even have a lung missing. Very likely has survived apparent drowning, has got through measles, typhoid and influenza. Nature has' singled him out for everything but early demise. Then the other fellow —the chap with health radiating from every pore—the man whom no car ever ran down, the man whom life insurance canvassers pursue with acclamation. You miss him from his accustomed haunts from Friday till Monday. "What's become of X.?" you ask. "Oh, he's dead—ran a splinter of wood into his thumb."

A news picture appropriate to a moment when so many armed horsemen are mooching about seeking death—for the other fellow — shows a trio of very smart BOOT AND Australian police troopers. SADDLE. Two lusty young fellows

arc trotting side by side, while the third is riding between them supported 011 his hands, his legs (complete in jodhpurs) pointing to the skies. The explanatory words tell you to what perfection police training has come. One is entitled to ask wltat branch of utility the chap with his feet in the air is up to. He might, of course, have to trfek five hundred miles into the NeverNcver to bring home a poor old Binjie, but he'd hardly bring him back upside down or even in jodhpurs. But the picture of three fine young men catchers doing circus tricks in order to l>e good man-catchers is the point that intrigues one. Reminds one that you never see portly senior sergeants upside down 011 horseback or sexagenarian police officers stooping from the saddle picking up the handkerchief to help them in their administrative duties. You remember the wicked cruelty of the heads of the American Army? It occurred to tiie.m that so many old dears had been wearing spurs for thirty or forty years that they ought to go a-riding—and they were mounted—had to totter out of their offices, abandoning the pen for the sword and saddleback chairs for saddles. Then apparently because they couldn't stand on their heads between two horses 01- chop a sheep in half they were retired. One almost wonders why athletic equitation should be thought necessary for even young policemen in a day when the cavalry man rides 011 a tin gee-gee armed with a pair of snips and a spanner. About three-quarters of the population of the world have never eaten bread, and most of them wouldn't know whether to ask for a two-pound loaf, a 'arf BA-KER! quartern or just a loaf. Bread is so important to ourselves that half a dozen rival bread carters will traverse the one street with from six to eight houses in it every day all the waking year. Now and again somebody, as in a Northern town, raises a dispute in which it is shown that few people ask for a two-pouiul or a four-pound loaf, the point being that the public trusts its tradesmen and finds usually that tradesmen can be trusted. It has been found from time to time that 'bakers have been known to give bread away—one batch in the dim past was found to be of seventeen ounces per "pound." An under-weight loaf has often been merely a loaf with.an ounce of water baked out of it. Millions'of people in the Empire buy their bread over the counter. Mother goes in and asks for a loaf and sees it weighed. The sellei; weighs it. If it should be short he cuts a bit from another loaf to make up the shortage and mother is satisfied. In many eases the carters take a scales with them, and mother sees it weighed at the cart's mouth. Are you old enough to remember the time in Now Zealand when the everyday two-pound loaf of white bread was stamped with a large "2"? Even without it. the average eater assumed that he or she was doing all right. Maybe there are people who having taken in the loaf rush to the scales— but as a usual thing one trusts the tradesman, just as one trusts the Post Office when he shoves valuable documents into a red street pillar. 'Member the time when you could get thirteen penny buns for a shilling? TONSORIAL TALK. Dear M.A.T., —Oil seeing the picture in the "Star" of the Abyssinian general complete with long hair and curiously cropped beard one wonders whom he Addis Ababa.—B.C.H. THOUGHTS FOR TO-DAY. Life is like a cup of tea: the more heavily we drink, the sooner we see the dregs.—Sir J. M. Barrio. The more modern poets arc quite capable of keeping the commas and leaving out the I words.—G. K. Chesterton.