THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 268, 12 November 1935, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

LUCK. been dining well but not wisely. "If you had listened to me we would have got £341 to divide between ue," remarked one of them, who evidently wanted hie mate to put, tjic money on for a place instead of a win. With that he hauled off and knocked his mate flying in the mud. Picking himseif up, the latter remarked: "There is no certainty you will get any of it now."—The Plunger. Once upon a time there was a man who had a very nice garden, just outside his bedroom window. He was a careless kind of a man with a lot of ehildTHE COIN BUSH, ren, and he often threw scraps of paper and things like that out of the window to "clear up" his dressing table. One day, after he had been clearing up, lie asked his wife if she had seen a threepenny bit he had lost. And she said no ehc hadn't—very likely he had epent it—and so he went to work penniless. One other day little Illie, one of his numerous children, bounced into the breakfast room iinHin" a red tobacco tin apparently full ot coins, "indeed, it was full of threepenny bits. Her na asked her where she had obtained them and Illic said—and her sisters confirmed her say—that she had picked them off a plant outside father's window. And so they all went out and found the plant with a few threepences left and a couple of threepenny buds about to burst. Later in the spring the family gathered sixpences, by leaving the threepenny buds to grow, and in the summer the shilling crop was very good, and the autumn half-crowns were positively glorious. In short, that is the story the careless man used to tell the bairns, the point being that* he had to keep on telling it every night until his brains reeled under the work. If he deviated in any particular—if he permitted his exuberant fancy to put a half-crown where a sixpence ought to have been, the childish cho-rne of protest raised the bedroom roof. The night lie new a pound note on the threepenny bush was" the limit. Which, after all, is another proof that humJtnity lovee old storiee, old songs, old memories. One of the curious things about Armistice Day is that no one knows of hie own s.ght what happens locally at eleven o'clock The individual is reduced to THE DAY AFTER, a statue at the warning sounds —and if he has the necessary reverence seee little but the pavement, the wall, the linoleum or the office floor —poor witnesses or chroniclers of a communal event. One of $ie remarkable things about this solemn fraction of time is that perfectly orderly people are occasionally unaware that anything novel is occurring— will bustle along cheerily, dead to the unique stillness of his fellow men, oblivious to the impressive cessation of commercial sounds and traffic, absolutely devoid of observation. They mean no harm —they have the rare faculty of closing the windows of the mind and pulling down the blinds. They live in a world of their own. Yet one supposes that if a two minutes' •silence continued for two days or two years these closed minds would at last open the windows and lift the blinds. It shows that we are not yet totally regimented, even in so harmless and" beautiful a concerted action. Armistice Day demonstrates, too, that the 1914 Great Mistake is an old and tattered affair already. A large ship's company, the whole parading in uniform, showed nearly all breasts without war ribbons—a refreshing sight. It meant that the war is but a historieal event to the majority of people now on oarth. May they all grow into veteran citizenship without meeting Mr. Mars. It is good not to know him. A quaint person with a twinkle in hie eye viva voce makes some post-Armistice remarks relative to peace and peace observances. Recommends, inter alia, WOE TO THE the severe sub-editing of VANQUISHED! hymns, patriotic songs and suchlike. Attacks the most superb of our "vocal gems" as instigators of war —even quotes theiii as examples of universal ferocity. "Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set, God Who made thee mighty—make thee mightier yet," under the assumption that Divine aid is and ought to be partial and victory and territory be to the strong and the hymn singers. The twinkler (who was rather in form) eaid he doubted jiot that the Italians make similar hymnal demands and desire also an Italy "wider still and wider" as to bounds and affect piety in this atrocious attitude. The twinkle: - quoted the popular of hymns as being extremely military and martial, from "Onward,. Christian Soldiers" to the famous American "Battle Hymn of the Republic." and the long, long list ■of "sacred" songs inciting to attack. He did not forget to mention the hymn of the "Marecillaise," which, incidentally, desires to fill the furrows with the unclean bodies of tiie enemy —all bodies other than their own being unclean. All seek Divine aid in the slaughter and intimate that the other fellow, who likewise seeks the same aid, is the world's most pestilent rascal. He thinks this type of piety needs sub-editing. That astute wordsmith. Robert Lynd, reviewing a quarter-century of social change, remarks on the greater social frankness of the times in verbal expresPOUDRE sion, in man and woman D'AMOUR. relationship—and in decorative designs for the feminine countenance. Indeed, every shop window may be the mirror for mv lady's toilette and man has become inured to toilette exhibitions that would have made his grandfather pull the brim of his beaver down to shut out. the intimacies of Queen Street. Babottc, seeking the wayside complexion, may have emerged from her home devoid of toiletries, or only partially provided with Summer Bloom. She is unlikely to have emerged minus a mirror. -And soit is written that Babette, sitting in an Auckland tram near an open window, referred to her rather pnlo countenance in a two-by-two looking glass and found it lacking. Unostentatiously she extended a dainty finger to the reddish edge outside the car—which had presumably lost its hard vanish—and applied the rouge thus obtained to her cheeks. She viewed the result with approval and proceeded on her way with the bloom of beauty and rugged health on her cheeke. And no man was astoniehed. Tram dust, one thought, might be a protection from the young man of the poem, whose fancy in spring lightly turns to thoughts of love. This adorable redness so easily obtained with a wet finger from tram dust will, one fears, pass away and by the year 1945 Babette is bound to assume that type of complexion obtainable from a passing white fence—for paleness as a fashion is bound to eucceed this roeiness. THOUGHTS FOR TO-DAY. Xature has given us two ears, T)ut only one mouth. —Benjamin Disraeli. Self-assertion is a mask which covers j many a weakness. . . . The , outward show Jβ nothing , , it ie the inward purpose that counts. —Captain Scott. Man's life being So short, and then the way that leads unto The knowledge of ourselves 50 long and tedious, Each minute should be precious. —Beaumont and Fletchen