WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 157, 21 March 1923, Page 6

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM (By T. D. H.) Lenin is recovering, nays a cable message.—A rapid convalescence is expected as his decease was only partial this time. Ex-Cabinet Ministers who reveal war secrets may be punished, we are told. —Perhaps they will be tried along with the ex-Kaiser. Names are treacherous. A Sydney journalist began a personal paragraph about a Air. Sparrow, manager of a large insurance company, taking a trip to Britain and being entertained prior to his departure. All went well until he closed the paragraph with the announcement that “accompanied by Mrs. Swallow he sailed by the R.M.S. Ormond© on Saturday.” Is there a divorce law in birdland? asks the correspondent who sends me the paragraph from tho “Sydney Alorning Herald.”

A message to-day brings through news of a glimpse of a land of which the world hears little and remembers seldom now that few people sing of Kipling’s Mandalay with th© temple bell* a-clinking. Burma is a big country, walled in by mountains on three sides, and with th© main road to Alandalay across a tempestuous ocean. Besides th© rainbow, silken-clad Burmese, th© most engaging race in the East, and the most easy-going and friendly, it contains many strange peoples in its less accessible parts. The cable message tells us of the unpleasant habits of some of these. Afarch is a bad season for travelling in some parts of the interior, for it is then that Wa men are collecting heads to freshen up their skull avenues. In another it is, or used to be, inadvisable to pass the Kachin men on the left side of the road as they resented this as a slight and whipped out their swords. The Afuh men are also deserving of the traveller’s respect as their neen acy w.t>, the crossbow is such that they can hit a threepenny piece with great regularity at twenty paces.

To-day is St. Benedict’s Day, and St. Benedict used more or less to be regarded as a patron saint of bachelors, for he was a great stickler for celibacy. If a bachelor is a Benedict, a newly married man is a Benedict, since Shakespeare wrote his play about th© sworn bachelor of that name caught in the toils of matrimony. Nowadays everyone calls the Benedicks “Benedicts,” and th© bachelors have lost their claim to their saint —which, perhaps, is no more than their deserts.

St. Benedict was th© patriarch of th© “Western monks, and _ it was the ordgr which he founded which half a century after Benedict’s death in 543, sent St. Augustin© and his forty companions to Christianise England. England was thus the first country out of Italy in which Benedictine life was planted. The Venerable Bede, th© learned scholar of tho Aliddle Ages, was a Benedictine, and Battle Abbey, which William the Conqueror founded in commemoration of his victory in 1066, was a Benedictine abbey. By degrees Benedictinc monasteries spread, all over Western Europe, and were in their day tho great centres of light and learning for our forefathers. St. Benedict’s rule was a great departure from that of the earlier monastic orders, which set great store on rags, voluntary starvation, and prayers at such short intervals that no proper sleep was possible. Instead, Benedict planned out a well-ordered day if labour in the fields and study, r.nd thus it came that his followers held aloft the lamp of learning and letters through Europe’s most barbarous centuries, and thus also it camo that they gave the world forty Popes, four Emperors, forty-six kings, and 3600 canonised saints.

A strong-room in a city insurance office was made rather more secure than usual by Sunday night’s shake, for when Monday morning came the door refused to open. Locksmiths, engineers, and what not were sent for, but Major Fitzurse remarked to me that it seemed to him a slight <n the house-breaking profession in New Zealand that no one thought of asking for assistance from the Terrace Gaol.

A.H.M. sends me a news item from his local paper about a French soldier who was shot dead while working the central heating plant at Essen Station, and which concludes with the announcement that the unlucky man was shot through the ventilator. “I hope,” adds my correspondent, “that the place named was not vital.” A.H.M. would probably be more disturbed to read in one London journal’s account of a recent shipwreck that the ship was in the charge of the pilot, while another reported that the pilot was in the charge of the ship. And yet the grammarians tell us that both phrases are equally correct waya of stating the same thing. Nevertheless the shipwreck happened.

At 3.29 p.m. on March 21, by Greenwich mean time, the sun is due to enter the sign Aries, and our autumn equinox begins. This places the event in the small hours of to-morrow morning bv our local time, which, if it is not to-day, is yet an hour or two before the next issue of The Dominion is due. It is extraordinary when you come to think about it now, the sun performs these operations without ever wanting a holiday, or going off on a skate. And equally mysterious is the inability of the weather to keep anywhere near the mark.

The closing of the hotels on th# licensing committee election day last week recalls to the mind of a correspondent who shall be nameless a story of a backblocks township somewhere on or off the Main Trunk line, where the licensing laws many years ago were more honoured m the breach than in the observance- The sale of whisky, it appears, was not limited to the few who enjoved the benediction of the licensing committee, but was practised by others who had even banded together in an unlicensed victuallers association. On the day of the licensing committee election these gentlemen became conscience-smitten, and met to decide whether they also were obliged to close!

Someone has dug up the fact that in the English Grand National Steeplechase in 1911 a one-eyed horse won the race, and was the only horse in tho race to escape mishap. Blind horses are said to have been frequently employed in the old stage coaches in Britain, and, being endowed with good courage, were considered safe ana useful. Sometimes a whole team of four would be blind, as “Nimrod records. “Well over that, sir,” said one of the old school of coachmen to the nervous passenger beside him on the box on passing over a dangerous bridge on a foggy night. “And only one eye among us.” The one eye was the coachman’s own. VALUES. O Love, could I but take the hours That once I spent with thee, And coin them all in minted gold, What should I purchase that would hold Their worth in joy to me? Ah, Lovo —another hour with thee! —Jessie B. Rittenhouse.