THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 184, 5 August 1936, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

As a people we are remarkably well shod. Down at lieelism is relatively uncommon. Barefootedness is mostly confined to the young,

who appear to like it. £ FOR LEATHER. But if shoes are to be forty per cent dearer, what about it? In the past with people not notably paupers, home repairs have been occasional. You know the man who has lialfsoled his shoes with old mocar tyre cut from the same with a blunt knife and hammered 011 with a carpenter's hammer and iron tacks? Watch tlie rear of your fellow citizens on the sidewalk. The sole of every shoe is visible as cach walker lifts his foot. >Tew shoes shriek aloud their newness —and the homemade sole of linoleum —oh, my goodness! One remembers during a dear boot epocli an otherwise immaculate man sitting in a drawing room with one foot cocked over his knee and his shoe sole displayed in all the beauty of a yellow-patterned bit of linoleum. He wa-, unaware of this display, and those who enjoyed the spectacle all wore poker faces. Bootless back-blockers in Australia place the bare foot Oil a bit of green hide, cut a generous edge, pierce holes all round, thread a sinew or string tl.;'o , ' r 'h—draw the lace over the foot — and are shod. There is the alternative, of course, r\f the "Prince Albert," or the* cornsack moccasin—but one fears one will have to pay the torty per cent —or go barefooted. Perhaps one could go to one of 0. Henry's delicious South American republics, where it is always afternoon and where they go without boots among the cockle burrs. Even the Eastern sandal shaped from the foot of a butter box and tied on with binder twine might serve. Nothing of this kind will i appen, however. We are too meek. We shall pay.

Constable Woelke, of the German civil police, has been promoted to commissioned rank for putting the shot by his fatter superior, who couldn't be THE a champion putter at the POLICEMAN'S Olympiad if he tried. RISE. Lieutenant Woelke is not

promoted for being a good constable; he is promoted for being a good shot putter —hence for sheer sentiment. Putting the shot, from the point of view of General Goering, seems to be of much more importance than lumbering Fritz, clubbing Hans with a baton or shepherding any nasty Nuzi about to commit theft. If this method of promotion was copied in civil life, the boss would be entitled to promote the bookkeeper to executive place because he could play the cornet, billiards, football, hockey or marbles —whichever the boss thought was the most desirable. A soldier (reverting to official life) might be promoted from corporal to subaltern, not for giving the enemy a sharp poke and a twist in the brisket with a bayonet, but for skill in the canteen dart club. Bo'suns might reach the altitude of admirals, not for acts of admiralty (Good gracious!), but for skill at rope quoits through long years of service. Cabinets might sit and decide that Jinks, M.P., should be added to the Ministry with all emoluments thereunto appertaining for acts of statesmanship at dominoes in the Parliamentary Library or political coups (or scoops) at shoveha'penny in Bellamy's. There is no limit to the number of rewards and promotions that might be* made outside the scope of a man's workaday life. Still, the Goering-Woelke precedent is not sport. Herr Woelke will be applauded for putting the shot instead of shooting the citizen. This can't go on. It must stop at once.

Here is a man who used to keep a farm. The farm didn't keep him—at least not in opulence—so he no longer keeps tlie farm. He is a man of mechanical THE LENDER, tendencies, and during his farmership piled up a collection of implements and shop tools of which he was proud. Most people in the vicinity did their repairs with a claw hammer, a spanner and fencing wire—tools and implements are expensive. So tlie rumour went round that this mechanical-minded man had tools galore—so he didn't have them much thereafter. A man, for instance, would look in and ask Mac if he could lend him, say, a set of stocks and dies. Mac would hand them over. "When do you want them back?" the borrower would ask. "Oh, say about a week," the owner would say. The intending borrower would be rather peeved and would ask, "A week, eh? Well, how long will YOU want them if I bring them back in a week?" The lender with the plethora of implements remembers seasons in which his lovely copper sprayer when he most wanted it had been absent spraying a neighbour's trees buckshee—barring the mixture—lias driven round the district to find his double-furrow plough, ascertaining that having lent it to Pink, Pink handed it along to Red, who having used it passed it along to Puce, who left it (having finished his patch) at the gateway, for the original owner to pick up, if the original owner should ever want a plough. He imagines a borrower who will some day come round and say, "Oh, you might lend me your house, will you? Me and the family want to come in next Tuesday. We want to burn our own place down—and we probably won't «et the insurance for a few montlies. That be all right ?"

One congratulates the Commonwealth on its determination to gather one hundred and fifty million bushels of wheat at the forthcoming harvest. May one ROMANCE congratulate oneself on a OP BREAD, decision not to personally assist in th : e harvesting of a single dratted bushel? Not that one depreciates the importance of grain in a world of hunger—staff of life and all that sort of thing A forty-hour week in an Australian wheatfield? Forty-hour day, more like it, in the dear old times when the wheat worker worked as long as there was a flicker of daylight and thereafter by moonlight, lamplight or by feel. Tens of thousands of acres of wheat in Australia are from what was mallee scrub land. A few decades ago the intending wheat cocky (it was the wheat cocky who gave the name "cocky" to'all cockies) took up, say, a square mile of mallee, a eucalypt that has a hold on the soil like the Scots race—the solidest, heaviest root that ever held down a small tree and provided the best firewood 011 earth. It might grow for a thousand miles on end and then some. And the cocky used to nick the larger mallee with an axe, hitch his bullocks to a log roller, and, dragging the roller in a track parallel to the bullocks" prepare for the future crop. When the scrub was down and dry he'd set fire to it—ye gods! what a fire, every leaf and stick burning like benzine—but the terrific roots would be there still—and often for many years. The' wheat farmer would sow the wheat in tlie ashes of the mallee, stumbling all day hither and thither with the sweat irrigating the earth. 111 earlier times he would smile at a tenbushej crop. Doesn't sound' much, does it? Pulling the heads off with a horse stripper was a dusty job—made your nose bleed Turning the handle of the hand winnower for fourteen hours per diem was Sheol. Taking twenty-five shilling's and salt horse a week for a seven-day toil was—well, what was it? There arc three vols, and an appendix in this subject. Pass the loaf!

THOUGHTS FOR TO-DAY. The old days never come again, because they would be getting- in the way of the new better days, whose turn it is.^Georo- e "YrarDonald. ° Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.— Douglas Jerrold.