THE WASTE OF THE YEAR.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 12593, 8 September 1906, Page 8

THE WASTE OF THE YEAR.

" Spring-cleaning" this season, will be marked by even, more than tJio usual energy in renovation'?, made m Miltonio style, "not wit£ou£ uiiet and heat." 80 ihjousewives forewarn us, tihis being tlieir characteristic tribute to the Exhibition year, which will probably leave many a eauvenir to be handled gingerly through many a spring-cleaning to come. Fortunately, we shall hare a monthi or so to forget their toite, or all ite attractions might be soured by reflection on the tyranny of things. An "Atlantic Monthly" essayist lately resolved domestio interiors into two stages—the mood of collection, when we amass photographs of friends, kodak albums of places visited, bric-a-brao, theatre programmes, dinner cards, until a house "the terminal " moiraine where •' glacier dumps at "length everything it has ' picked, up "during its progress through ..all "Jande"; or the mood of dispersion, when we send books to hospital Ebrariee, pictures to institutione, heap nicknacks on friends, and consign half tihe- treasures of our past to the fire or the lumber room. A pronounced attack of this 'mood was illustrated by the young Amexi|Nftj£ who, with tax small one "help," stilt kept a Vpofikee honwi anda soul eerenb. She explained her secret: '"My dear, otaoe «. month,. I give ,; away every eingle thing in the house "that we do not imperatively need. It "sounds wasteful, but I don't think it "really , is. eometimoe ''Jeremialb. "moane over missing old ' clothes "or back numbers of some of "the magazines, but I tell him "that if he does rant to be "ntated to a gibbering lunatic, he will "let mc do ac I like." The rubbiehtotal accumulated during even"the! iroderately orderly couree of a year , * living does, in. fact, suggest some clear good cense in "such a rule. We ma/ plead, no doubt, the analogy of Nature, as too often exemplified in suburban gardens Top a hedge of a year's overgrowth, and you stand dismayed before J the pile of useless lumber that hedge had contrived to yield. A single tree, which dik -not appear extravagantly clothed, can. Scatter dead leaves enough to bury,, day after day, the whole-sur-face of your half-acre lawn. But this last is an autumn grievance, not properly Fo be brought up in these blameless days of spring. And both hedge and trees have the defence that ifc> ie through mane own intemperate sseal in planting they invade hie peace. If travel 'end pleasure have their debrie, the moment wo take to work we take to rubbish-making. Half the inventions concerning labour concern doing away with" the detritus of labour. The industrious child contributes more to the year's rubbish than the idle one. AH the painstaking drawing, all the copy-books, all the brush-work about which tho educational world is busy, what docs it mean but producing present food for the destructor, however great the reward in some far-away use? Man, "half deity, hilf dust," is a rubbieh-maker from his earliest pot-hooks to the day when he forsakes that rubbish with which grave-diggers, cremation societies, and Towere of Silence, are qualified to deal. In all our experiences, it is certainly only the "baseless fabric of a vieion" that can bo depended upon to "leave not a " rack behind."