WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 94, 15 January 1926, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

Electioneering in Aleppo, according to the news, is a life and death matter.

It takes an hour to walk over the Vanderbilt palace in Fifth Avenue, New York, which is about to be pulled down to make way for an hotel. This sumptuous home, if such it can be called, was first thrown open to public view in November last at a dollar a head, •and the mob has been swarming in ever since with successive reductions in the admission money, and new strata of the populace tapped whenever the attendance begins to fall off. There are forty rooms in the building, which has five floors, and one of the greatest centres of attraction is Mrs. Vanderbilt’s famous bath tub. This is most elaborately carved from a single piece of r white marble weighing several tons, and it cost £lO,OOO before it was finally fixed up to its owner’s satisfaction in its mirrored bathroom —and . yet it ( seems it was just plain, plebian water that the lady washed in. Even a Vanderbilt lias his worries, , despite his millions, and the late Mr. ' Reginald Cornelius Vanderbilt, who died four months back, was no exception. Twenty years back they were having one of their periodical cleanups in New York, and the DistrictAttorney, Mr. Jerome, was on the trail of Richard Canfield's famous New York gambling house. Mr. Vanderbilt was reported to have been a player and ’ heavy loser in the establishment, and Mr. Jerome desired his attendance at court as a witness. The millionaire was not in the least desirous of this sort of publicity, and Mr. Jerome’s process-servers followed him from point to point over the United States, with Mr. Vanderbilt living in. a state of perpetual motion and flitting ahead of them. The chase was given up when he took steamer for Europe, and remained an exile for a year, until the high plav in Mr. Canfield's establishment bail ceased to interest either the courts or the newspapers. , The Fifth Avenue brown-stone, mansions reared their ornate fronts in the days when New York society took itself very seriously., and no self-respect-ing millionaire failed to dine on gold plate with at least a dozen courses and ’ an elaborate ritual of etiquette. A lot of raw millionaires broke in later on and the old ceremonious stuffing of the gold-plate dinners gradually gave way until the present-day rowdy cabaret dinner-dance period arrived. New York society is stated to be now almost human, and is almost tolerant towards outsiders who seek admission into it. In fact, that high New York, social authority, Mr. Frank Crowninshield,, estimates that the number of those who comprise society there has increased by a thousand per cent, during the past thirty years. * # It was in the ’nineties that New York societv put up its hardest battle to keep the outsiders out. Fashionable people began to build iron walls around their country houses; to blackball the less known 'candidates at their clubs ; and to band together m every possible wav in order to keep the threatening invaders out. This terrified dread of outside encroachments upon the part of society made the wav easy . for a famous and picturesque figure m New York life, the redoubtable Ward Me Allister, whose inspired and liappv task it was to keep the insiders in and /the outsiders out, a task that occupied him until his death in 189 j. * In 1892 Mrs. William Astor, the. most portentious figure in the social history of America, made her famous request to Mr. McAllister. Said this, undisputed social sovereign of the millionaires to her stalwart henchman: “I am beginning to think about my annual dance, and, as mv ballroom is only large ' enough for ’four hundred people, I want vou to help me cut down my invitations to approximately that number. Mr. McAllister, scenting a labour quite to his liking, consented smilingly. After the invitations had been dispatched, lie chanced to remark to some fiends of his that only four hundred people had been invited to the gnat lady’s dance. His remark was repeated to others in the club, and subsequently found its wav into the pages of the “World ” the society editor of winch even printed, with only a score or more errors, the names and pen-and-ink portraits of the fortunate mortals who had been bidden to the sacred festival The term Four Hundred is now used universally to describe those people who dwell in New York society s more rarefied altitudes. 'Apropos of Queensland’s false alarm volcano a correspondent sends. P ar |j c "' lars of a similar occurrence, in New Zealand, when, as detailed tn Mr. I. Lindsay Buick’s “Old Marlborough a supposed volcano was sighted in full eruption in that ordinarily well-behaved part of New Zealand. “A .great sensation was created throughout New Zealand in March, 1855,” writes Mr. Buick, “bv the reported discovery of an active volcano iji Marlborough. It ap pears that while the Lady Grey, a • steamer trading between the colony and the Chatham Islands, was near ng the coast, those on board noticed what was afterwards described as wreaths of white vapour rising in a thin and unsteady column’ from a high and conical-shaped mountain in the Kaikoura Range, culminating in a canopy of smoke.’ ” _ _ ■* * * “The spectators of this phenomenon,” we are told, “at once concluded that a new volcano had. bur. t into activity, and although their report was not sustained by passengers on the steamer Nelson, which arrived in Wellington shortly after the Lady Grey thev still maintained their ground. While the discussion was at its height old Jack Guard came over from Port Underwood, and on. being questioned he laughed at the idea ot a volcano being in full swing on Ins side of the water, and he not to know anything about it. To set the matter at'rest a partv went across the Strait in his whaleboat, and proceeding to Flaxbourne, found the cause of all the excitement was an old shepherd who had set fire to the fern on Ben More, and the flames ascending the mountain slopes had ignited a clump of white birch trees which then grew on the summit, hence the,‘wreaths of white vapour,’ and the ‘canopy of smoke,’ tn which Marlborough’s active volcano terminated.” It is all right to make money if making it comes quite easy . , . but don’t ask us to praise yon for a desire to keep it. LONDON TOWN. Oh, Loudon Town’s a fine town, and London sights are rare, And London ale is right ale, and brisk’s the London air, And busily goes the world there, but crafty grows the mind, And London Town of all towns Ini glad to leave behind. Then hey for croft and hop-yard, and hill, and field, and pond, With Bredon Hill before me and Malvern Hill beyond. q Then hey for covert and woodland, and ash and elm and oak, Tewkesbury inns, and Malvern roofs, and Worcester chimney smoke, The apple-trees in the orchard, th cattle in the byre, And all the land from Ludlow town Bredon church’s spire. —John Masefield