THE GIRL IN THE BOX.

Manawatu Times, Volume LXV, Issue 1922, 16 May 1913, Page 7

THE GIRL IN THE BOX.

AN APPRECIATION. London, April 2. Mr James Douglas gives a glimpse of another byway of London life in the Daily News—an incident you may see any day in a Tube station. This incident happened "the other day in the very throat of a City siffleur. You know the thing—a cold glazed vestibule, with a bookstall, automatic machines, and automatic men. As you go down the polished throat you feel like a penny in a slot, and as you come up you feel like another penny in auother slot. "In a corner there was a narrow strip of space which was not filled with automatic machine and automatic men. It was about three yards long and about three feet wide. Upon this tinv ledge some ingenious trafficker had built a whole shop front filled with nicotiana—pipes, tobacco, cigarettes, match-boxes, and so forth. Behind the absurd little facade was inserted a living creature, with less room to live in than any bird or beast in the Zoo.

"Hurrying past the slit you would not suspect that there was a living thing imprisoned two yards away. I do not think I should ever have made the discovery if I had not noticed a young man smiling into the slit. Now young men as a rule do not smile into slits, unless there be something behind to smile at. "And what was this disturbing and distracting creature that dwelt in a hole into which you could hardly thrust a comfortable coffin? Only a girl with shining hair and shining eyes and a shining smile and a shining halo of youth hovering over her head. There were thousands of girls like her trotting to and. fro in the streets, but this girl among the automata looked like a lyrical outburst of life in her little prison made of pipes and matchboxes and packets of tobacco. And at her bidding all the passing automata suddenly forgot to be automatic (like the toys in the workshop of the famous Nuremberg tovmaker), and came alive in the most amazing manner. "Let me be quite fair and admit that the puppets in top-hats had the grace to be furtively ashamed of themselves. bought their Cigarettes and their match-boxes with a ahaimingly guilty air of reluctant haste, as if confessing that they had no real need of them, and as of they were half afraid of the imprisoned witch and her smiling spells. It was a splendid riot of life suddenly discovering its right to be alive, of youth audaciously venturing to be young, of blood recklessly daring to be red. And as I watched the comedy it struck me that the girl in her little prison of tobacco leaves was less a prisoner than she looked, for youth is liberty, and even to look on youth is a liberation of the soul."