ON GETTING THE SACK.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 102, 1 May 1908, Page 3

ON GETTING THE SACK.

There is pleasure, of course, in sailing a small open boat through a rough sea, or in tobagganing down the Cresta at eighty miles an hour, or in driving a high-powered motor-ear. There is no complaint against the more delicate joys of golf, or lawn tennis, or cricket. It is not disputed, in fact, that these pleasures have much in thefr favour; but they all, ; it seems, lack the necessary quality of surprise. ,' You enjoy them deliberately ; but a pleasure to be per.feet must .be involuntary, else it will be injured by the rival delights of anticipation. The thing to do is. to take your pleasures as you do your jokes—at a moment's notice. It is grotesque to look forward to a joke, ,and for much, the same reason it is injudicious, to look forward' to a pleasure. There is a prejudice against it, and. it has never had a chance to take its place as a pleasure. Many have known it, but few have recognised its peculiar ■merit, and it has been / put down, generally, as something to be avpided, and even dreaded. .■ i . '"It is difficult to account for this feeling against ' getting the sack. 5 The very phrase has a homely, cheerful sound, and it is, in a way, an index to the spirit of the thing. -Only a delightful institution ever attains the distinction of slang. There must 'be something human and appealing: , about it, and it must lend itself to laughter and jokes at its expense. Ana it is significant that no experience is so productive of slang as " getting the sack." You can either,. as jin the North of England,," get the 'bag," or. "get the empty," or "get\ , the bullet," anld you can be ' kicked,'' " fired," " pushed," "booted," or. " sacked." The number of these phrases suggests undoubtedly a/certain playful attitude. It is clear that

the institution is not taken quite seriously, and it does not seem, as yet, to be-taken quite seriously enough as a pleasure. Yesterday, very likely, you were sitting at some desk, and you had not the enterprise to' know that you were quite unfitted for the job. "Week after week you had submitted to the tyranny of it. Moodily you have pored over ledgers and cash books, and IVOU had come to look upon the world as one vast sum which it was an awful bother to add up. You seen that you were not the same as the other men, who fitted in so perfectly with. the precise furniture of the office, but you had thought that the thing to do was to try, desperately, to bring yourself to the same pattern. 'But to-day you are free. You have receiyed a stately note, from the head of the office saying " your engagement terminates in a week." At Slice you are a different man. No more for you the " desk dead wood." You are free to go where you will, to earn your living as you jolly well can. You can chop wood fresh from the tree; you can get up at five in the morning on a farm; you can goto sea in a crazy old boat; you can ride a hundred miles to see a friend in Canada.

You are in a different world, and you are astonished to find how interesting it is. You had thought, at the desk, that the world was dull, and had nothing £o offer you except figures, and the debit and the credit side, and perhaps, in the evening, a theatre. But now you find, walking cheerfully along the street with a few pounds in your pocket, that it is quite an exciting j stimulating place. Under the kindly pressure of the crisis you see and. know fresh things. History, for instance, has always been a dead thing to you. You had looked upon Raleigh and Drake, and the rest of them, as school figures produced by some authority, for educational purposes. But now you know that they were real ? and you hasten to claim kinship with them. You feel yourself an adventurer, and if there were an America to discover you would cheerfully, set out on the journey. AH the open boats that you have sailed in come back to you, and you feel again the pull of the wind on the lug-sail and the rushing of ■ the water at the bows. The open air and the sea and sky have been restored to you 2 and you enter eagerly into your heritage. For years you have been robbed of these things, and almost reconciled to the loss, but now that they have come back to you you realise their value, an*d you are grateful for the crisis which caused ( them to make such kindly overtures. Even the streets become different. No longer are they mere business thoroughfares filled with sleek, prosperous figures. All the harshness and the hurry of them go, and they appear in their true perspective as the haunts of men and women struggling bravely against odds. For the first time, too, you know that there are certain women who try, all d.ay, to get' a living by selling matches. You had not noticed them before, but now a new sense has come to you, the sense of sympathy, and rather, sheepishly you buy a box of matches and give the woman sixpence. You have an odd feeling of s security and of independence of the attentions of Fate. You can say, with Butler, ,'i-I am not now in Fortune's power: he that is down can fall no lower." You become a stoic, a philosopher, and adventurer-^at a week's notice. You can patiently spend ten minutes in looking for your stud, arid the state of the weather does not affect you. Every one, probably, has this appreciation of a crisis of some kind, and it is a matter for surprise that the crisis of "the sack" is not more popular. Nothing sweeps away with so much facility the little tiresome things, and nothing , brings to you more genially the 'appreciation of adventure. The experience can indeed do no one any harm.—E. Clephan Palmer, in St. James' Budget.