CASUAL COMMENTS

Evening Star, Issue 20316, 26 October 1929, Page 2

CASUAL COMMENTS

LAST THINGS [By Leo Panning.] Pale flowers! pale perishing flowers! Ye are types ot precious things; Types of tnose bitter moments, That flit, like life’s enjoyments, On rapid, rapid wings: Last hours with parting dear ones (That Time the fastest spends) Lhst tears in silence shed, Last words half uttered,_ Last looks of dying friends. —From Caroline Southey’s ‘ Autumn Flowers 1 Rather a gloomy opening, dear friends, but the whole of the column will not be like that. Indeed, with such a subject as ‘ Last Things,’ any writer may feel himself as much tugged to gaiety as to gravity, and at the last may give a mixture as I shall now. «■ . (* • « When all things are lost except the will to win, there is, always a hope that Fortune’s frown will turn at last into a smile—and so wo can go on with thrills of hope deferred,' which can bring more interest to life than realities that lose their savour in a routine of success. « e ® » So a man sorely buffeted by disdainful fortune, spurned by the rich, and ignored by the poor, may console himself with a meditation on the old proverb "He laughs best who laughs last.” And even if the laugh does not come, ’ it is something to live for. « * • • Enough! Let us have the lighter measure of lasts; the others are already too plentiful. I saw in the ' New Zealand Artists’ Annual’ a drawing of a well-beaten racehorse above a verse headed ‘ After the Fall of the Curtain ’:— Wo all like to vision the winner flash past. And cheer if we’ve backed him—that’s if But few of us wait for the horse that comes last, The moke that’s a trier—but stiff. To back tho last horse in the _ last race—in the rosy hope of a big hit to make up for the previous misses—and then to miss the last train and the last service car by lingering too long over the last drink at the booth on the course is the last thing in punters’ luck—but it is a blow that many must have suffered • * » • Truly the great majority of consistent losers or the turf have unlosablo faith in the prospect of a recovery on the last race Ir that attitude they arc like all other gamblers Think of some person’s last throw of tho dice through the centuries! The anxious waitings for the turn of a last card I What miseries have been suffered at Monte Carlo when the last stake has been set on tho table and the pitiless croupier has swept it away! « « « » What were the last thoughts of Imperial Julius Ltesar when he was falling under the daggers of the Roman Republicans ? Tradition says that his last feeling was one of sadness at seeing his dear friend Brutus among the assassins, but probably he had chiefly a. sense of regret at this sudden ending of his hope for world domination. Napoleon would have similar thoughts when he had lost his last battle. • * * • Last curtains of great actors! Think of the feelings of a popular idol who is really retiring 1 He has lived so many parts before so many people—and on tho morrow he is to bo in an immeasurably different world—a spectator of things—never again to sway an audience with a subtle syllable or a gesture 1 dm aI! wonder that so many of tho stars that threaten to set linger above the horizon until they are in peril of that unwelcome lagging which they all droau o * ® • Last fights of famous pugilists! Do the remnants of the big purses comfort them enough when younger and stronger rivals for the world’s plaudits have crashed them into the background? Even Tunney, the cold precisionist of the ring, who did not wait for the knock that comes at last to an umretiring Dempsey, must. have a yearning now and then for the old excitement. * * * * Last matches of mighty footballers I What pangs they must have in their

first season on the snectatorial side of the field of play. The shouts and applause of the crowd are for others. A thrilling chapter of life has closed; but happily they can get into other scrums and rushes which are plentiful in all countries. a e » » “Last chance!” There is a phrase which has stirred a few persons m and out of courts, offices, and other places. When a man gets to the stage when he hears that sentence, ho will either break (if he is too far gone for mending), or he will become much better that he has been. He will not stay half-and-half. • » « Some time ago I saw “ Last Chance ” as the name of a claim of gold miners. For fossickers who had failed in other fields such a name would hold a wealth of romance. What pictures it gives of tramps and camps, feats and famines, revels and dead levels of despondency, lifting again to heights of hope. Some superstition would come into the choice of that name. “ Last Chance ” —the old gambling belief in a turn of the luck. « « 9 * Last overdraft at the bank! The sympathetic but firmly unresponsive bank manager has told the merchant or the manufacturer that circumstances beyond his control demand a cessation of advances, and the disappointed applicant has hopes that his salesmen will have superhuman success, that markets will improve, or something else will happen to enable him to soften the frigid financial heart. • ft # « The last word in an argument! Do we not all like to have it? But it does not always do us any good when we get it. In debates between men and women the “last word ” is traditionally woman’s. It is a wise man who lets it go at that. e e « e Cast oh some of the guns used by Germany during the Great War were the grim words “ Ultimo Ratio Regis” (which may be roughly translated as “The last argument of the King”). The suggestion is, of course, that the mailed fist must be used when soft speech does not avail. The same kind of thing goes on everywhere in different spheres At school the last argument of the head master is the strap or cane.

Many other lasts call for notice—the last biscuit of the shipwrecked crew, the last ration of the lost caravan in the desert, the last match of bewildered trampers caught by a storm among mountains, the last planks in collapsing political platforms.

Here and there- various prophets are exercising their minds on the question of the last of the human race and the last of the world; but whenever they have been rash enough to .fix a date for- the disasters the old globe has always rolled them out of court. None of us will see the last of the earth.