A MAN OF THE WORLD.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3334, 16 August 1926, Page 8

A MAN OF THE WORLD.

(By Heckles Wilson.)

A blind man seated in a corner of the market place of a small French town. Blind, but he is not asking alms. Bound about him are disposed some two score little heaps of sand and pebbles. Neatly inscribed Tables inform you that these represent the continents, islands and archipelagoes of the .world. Into these little heaps are stuck more than a hundred miniature flags; behold the nations of the world! A crowd surrounds the blind man—who is delivering a strange monologue on geography. And as he talks he is constantly shifting his seat. One leg goes over a foot high heap of stones. “Voila! I cross the Himalayas, I am now in Tibet,” or at another time, “I descend the Nile—this is the Congo.” The country stare and exchange smiles as well they may—for was there ever anything so curious as this blind man crawling about in his little wilderness of flags, lifting his body over tho rusty wire which serves to indicate the equator; a non resting his elbow on the North Pole; describing artlessly the various physical, ethnological and economic details of a planet he lias never so much as seen!

He keeps long hours, this blind geographer; for when I passed the marketplace again it was moonlight, and the broad expanse of pavement was all but deserted. Yet there he still sat amidst his untidy little heaps of continents, islands and the kingdoms of the earth. There were only two auditors —both English motorists and transient sojourners for the night. “Observe that t am now in China, messieurs ei mesdamos. China- i» surrounded by a wall 30 metres high. It i-. rilled by an Emperor called the Son o! Heaven, and produces vast quantities ul rice and lea, upon which 400 millions ol' the inhabitants, whose skin i> yellow, subsist ” Hi! duly traversed the Celestial Empire and was crawling gingerly over I lie Korean Straits to Japan, when I ventured to engage him in conversaI ion.

He mid me his name was Bouquiu. For nearly 40 years he has been doing ibis sort of tiling all over France-. All ids assortment of knowledge he curries in ids bend. Set him down anywhere: furnish him with a bushel or two of stones and graved and he will forthwith delimit Asia and Africa and build iqi the Alps and Rocky Mountains for your delectation. This earth has no secrets for this man; for 40 years he has amassed scrap after scrap of information which he distils to mixed multitudes, to whom in spite of all the schools and schoolmasters this planet is still as strange as Mars was to Galileo. He might have been content to sit silent on his strip of pavement and beg alms. But no, Bouquiu lias a mission in life: lie is an authentic man ol science. He has dedicated himself io (lie larger, broader, universal life. Be.nqnin is a man of the world.