WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 220, 11 June 1924, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

With a little more practice the aviators may fly round the world in as brief a time as it took Magellan sail round it.

Japan is proposing to cut out American missionaries and American films. But weren’t the American missionaries sent to keep the American films out:

Another British Labour M.P. has won the Dunmow Flitch. —Mr. H- G. Wells will never be able to put these Labour M.P.’s in his novels, if they live happily with their wives like this.

Since presented by the Countess of Warwick with Essex’s most palatial mansion house as a week-end resort, the Labour members of the House of Commons seem to have acquired a taste for the locality and its customs. A mile or two aw’ay is Little Dunmow. where after trial before , a jury, of bachelors and spinsters a flitch of bacon is awarded annually to any couple who can prove that for a twelve-mouth ana a day they have lived happily without jar or contentious strife, and have not even in thought wished themselves unmarried again. When the custom first originated in the thirteenth century the trial was a serious affair, before the Prior, with bell, book, and. candle, but its modern revival is mainly the , occasion for local junketing. Last year Mr. Tom Groves, who went straight from a London tramcar building depot to the House of Commons, ■came across to Dunmow from the Labour Party’s Lodge and won the bacon. Now Mr. Mardy Jones, Atom the same quarter, has got it.

Mr. Mardy Jones, while a mere lad, became the' breadwinner of a family of six, after his father was killed in a Welsh coal mine, the fate also of both his grandfathers. He not only succeeded in keeping the home together on his meagre youthful earnings, but earned enough in the end to get himself two years and a half at Ruskin College at Oxford, and some of the books he has since written have been highly praised as a credit to Oxford economics. Not everyone who leads the strenuous life that Mr. Mardy Jones must have Jed finds time in be< tween times to be nice to his wife, for making twopence do <the work of a shilling and studying at night after working all day is apt to put an edge on one’s nerves. As old Matthew Prior, / sari; “Ah, madam! Cease to be mistaken. Few married fowl peck Dunmow bacon.”

The people who say they never be* lieve what they read in the papers are sometimes identical with those who ho to the reporters.

One swallow does not make a summer. but how many swallows make a nieal? Mr. Gladstone and other meth* odical people with regard for their internal arrangements have declared that the proper rule in eating is twenty bites for each mouthful. A correspondent of the London “Morning Post” provides data for, working out how maiiv bites make a Gladstonion meal. “When in hospital during the war with both arms entirety ' disabled,” he writes, “I was of necessity fed bv a nurse, and out of curiosity and boredom took to counting the spoonfuls I received. The standard lunch of meat and two vegetables resolved itself into between thirty-five and forty mouthfuls, while the following milk pudding and stewed fruit ran to about thirty-five- Daily observation for five weeks established these averages on full hospital diet.”—This makes seventy to seventy-five mouthfuls, and with twenty , bites for each is 1400 to 1500 bites to. a meal. The thought of those 1500 bites must make dinner hang like a black cloud over the day, and probably accounts for. the fancy these dietarians have of giving themselves a holiday now and then by taking the starvation cure for a week or two.

An Auckland inventor claims to be the- real inventor of the death ray;. durinc the war he developed a heat ray, he says, that killed animals, apparently, by concentrating a beam through lenses.—This is quite a ; different type of ray from that which the Germans stole- from Major Tilzurse, but the Major sars that while not valuing the heat ray very highly he cannot pass over any Auckland claim to priority in its invention. In the Unshire County Society’s records for 1853 will he found a paper read by Major Fitzurse, then vice-president of the society, on the results of 11ls’ experiments in his leisure moments in killing flies with a burning glass- From those experiments by a series of mathematical calculations the Major deduced the size and number of burning classes that would be required to project a heat rav of sufficient intensity to annihilate the garrison of Sebastopol. The project received encouragement from the highest quarters, buli its further development was abandoned when it was found that the British glass-making industry had been bankrupted by the building of the Crystal Palace two years before.

The Major found that a difficulty with the burning death-ray wag that of getting the enemy to remain in the right spot while the ray burned him up. and the sunshine records at Sebastopol were also slightly against its effective employment there. The Major proposed to place his burning glasses in the vicinity of Red Cross field hospitals. where they would not tie damaged by enemv shell-fire. The detestable practice of the enemv in the late war in shelling the Rod Cross, _ however, raises another difficulty in ths development of this branch of scientific warfare.

The recent item in the news telling how Prince George, performing a public ceremony at a great naval centre, was unable to borrow a sub-lieuten-ant’s frock-coat, reminds a “Manchester Guardian” correspondent that naval officers are not as a rule 100 well off and do not carry many spare uniform frock coats. “When I was a midshipman,” he says, “our mess possessed only one good suit of uniform between us. When on one occasion it was necessary for us to present ourselves for a viva voce examination each member of the party carefully changed into the solitary No.. 1 jacket before he entered tho examination room, and scrupulously handed it over to his successor when he came out On the occasion of any festivity we drew lots who should wear it, and when we had all finally secured promotion to sub-lieutenants the coat was left on board the old ship as a legacy to the succeeding generation of ‘snotties.’ ”

“Oh, yes,” said Don to his minister. during a pastoral call, “I ken well enough what, metapheesics is. When the party wha listens disna keri what the party' wha speaks means, and when the party wha speaks disna ken wlia he means himsel,’ that’s metapheesics, mon.”

TO APHRODITE: WITH A MIRROR Here, Cyprian, is my jewelled lookingglass, My final gift to bind my final vow« I cannot see myself as once I was; I would not seo myself as I am now* —Aline Kilmer m tho “New Yorfc Outlook.’*