WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 270, 20 August 1925, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

The difference between an art union and a lottery appears to be that one is legal and the other isn’t.

Spain is spending much money in sending another army to Morocco —and may spend rather more in getting it out again.

Victoria is experimenting with putting prisoners on their honour—a similar experiment with the police force failed a while ago.

A disposition is noted in the United States to refer every problem to Henry Ford—except that of traffic congestion.

An American journal says the violence of the Santa Barbara earthquake may be estimated by the fact that it shocked Hollywood.

New Zealand has a lot to learn yet about putting real pep into its publicity. We have been reading an article on Wisconsin in an American magazine, and it has left us With a feeling that we ought to import the man who wrote it and let him loose in this country. If lie . could write about Wisconsin like this, with its Milwaukee breweries turning out nothing morp stimulating than near-beer, what couldn’t he do in New Zealand on the rgal thing? The author, who writes in the “American Motorist,” modestly conceals his identity, but our readers may like an excerpt or two. He starts off comparatively coldly, but warms up as he goes on.

“It takes all kinds of neople,” we are told, "to make a world and most of all these kinds are touring. Blessed is he who with magic hand can give men what they want. Blessed is Wisconsin which comes so close to doing

this. ... Of forty-eight States comprising this Union—not including the provinces of Canada—thirty offer distinct variety ; thirty possess the charm of individualism. They lure the modern Ulysses by every wile known to vampires ; some have beauty of presence (New York) ; some employ seductiveness (Florida) ; some frankly advertise capability (Iowa).; some bespeak sexless camaraderie (Texas); Some have the pure breath of babies in their mouths (California). A few, like Illinois, have dual personalities—social graces in manicured hands and a kick in each foot.”

• * » The writer next disarms the sceptic by candidly admitting that if one "could dart in an airplane from State to State existence might be tolerable even without Wisconsin. But until that is possible “Wisconsin, the potpourri of America, satisfies the jaded taste.” Not that Wisconsin is all-sufficient for everybody, or tffllt it can grant completely every slightest wish of every migrant Soul? “But,” says our author, "it comes the nearest to being a little of all that is desirable; most closely approximates a combination of the better parts of this wonderful land. After all, that is no small thing to do. Even Heaven itself interests only a fair percentage of mankind."

Heaven, however, is left standing at the post as the author warms up in earnest on the subject of Wisconsin. In an artless spirit of collecting Wisconsin “has stolen high and low and put. away in its commodious treasure chest jewels of nature, precious stones of topography, different kinds of air—like the spices of Araby appealing to different nostrils, and waters more inspiring than all the bottled fluids-of all the old-time masters in distillation, more medicinal than, the fabled waters of Lethe.”

“The rivers of Wisconsin have played hell with the land. It must b? that, because at the Dalles of the St. Croix and the Wisconsin one is showed the Devil’s Chimney, the Devil’s Kitchen, the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and indeed the whole Damned Outfit. Grotesque enough these astonishing rock formations look, to come naturally by the names they have. . . . Slabs as broad as .the Republican and Democratic platforms together are supported on a delicate stem of rock that a flip of the hand would seem able to snapr—and twelve feet tall. At Kilbourne a way leads through a fissure cut out of the solid stone by the wearing work of unwearying water through thousands and thousands of years. A monument to patience! At about the time that Cain and Abel were discussing, with so tragic a climax, the still unsettled question of What is Capital and What is Labour, the Wisconsin River was finishing its job at Kilbourne and moving off to a new channel. Since then the. scene has remained unchanged. What ironv, then, that a feminine visitor, glancing upwards at a two-hun-dred-ton rock balanced precariously, should shriek in the fear that it would fall on her. O little flea, what sublime human conceit.” * #

It is when at length the author reaches the Gitchee Gurnee, or Lake Superior, country that he really opens out. “Here,” he savs, “the past is forgotten and the future is an absurdity. Space cries aloud to space, and there is no answer.” And then vou catch real trout there: “Hay fever and asthma die like rats in a trap and leave nnfient b°hind to catch trout, .not troutinas or troutettes or those piscatorial miniatures that wrigrte in a pasture brook and that croaking frogs swallow whole without skinnmt* a note in their anthems, but trout. An effective test of how mpch harm the now defunct fever has done-is to don hip boots and fish down the middle of one of the supremely beautiful streams cascading over broken boulders down to the lake. A long, lazy whip of the rod: the descent of the fly; the strike—and then the fight of a onehundred and eighty-pound man with three-pound fish. Waste no sympathy on the fish. Give it—oh tnve it to the man! 1/ he lands that fish—• if he lands it—and if he eats it, head and tail and bones, he may get back in those three pounds most of what he has lost in the ordeal. And he. will have proved his health. That is to say, if ’’

No on reflection we feel it would not be a’fair thing to bring this eloquent Wisconsite out to write up New Zealand. He might land a .fifteen-pound trout in the Tongariro Rivey, and his literary reaction to that experience must surely be fatal. ‘‘Well sir/' asked the musician, “what do you think of my composttl°‘Wliat do I think of them?” said the critic' “Well, they will be played when Gounod, Beethoven, and Wagner are forgotten.” “Reallv?” “Yes, but not before.’ time-piece. Caught, caught is the wild cuckoo That sang among the flowers; They have prisoned him in a dark prison To count them the hours. Between the dawn and the dim evening Twelve songs must he sing, That men mav reckon the day’s passing And the passing of Spring. O they have shattered the sweet April And' slain the heart of May, Because thev have stolen the wild cukoo To tell the time of day And wearilv sings the wild cuckoo, Wearilv s’ings he now, Because his heart would cease from singing And his thi'oat knows not how. —Jan Strother, in the “Spectator.**