A BRAVE BEGINNING

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6631, 9 June 1928, Page 10

A BRAVE BEGINNING

Some thirty or forty years ago, a poor, shabbily-clad porter, working at an out of tho.way station in Poland, spent his few leisure moments scribbling down odd things he had seen and heard on tho railway line. Tho youth did not think much of these scribblings which were mostly done while he was watching for the next train to come in, or in a dimly lighted corner of the miserable uuheated waiting-room. Of paper, he had very little; his stumpy' pencil had been purloined from the station-master's cubby hole; and often ho wmuld scribble in the dark, because all lights went out after the last train had passed, and no one dreamed of providing him with a candle. Still he went on scribbling. Came the great day when he resolved to buy a stamp. An envelope seemed but he bought that as well. And, having got the address of a Warsaw paper, the young porter dispatched his grimy notes; dispatched them and tried to forget them! “There are such grand folks in Warsaw. They will never bother* about me. And, after all, what had I to write about?” But in a few weeks the porter had his answer. Tho editor had seen promise of big things in those miserable scribbled efforts. Would the young porter care to come out and try his luck amongst people who mattered in

Warsaw] Would he care? Of course, he packed up his meagre belongings and sallied forth, tho station-master grimly prophesying the worst of bud endings for him —"When people try to rise above their station, my lad. . .” That station-master was a poor prophet. Years later, tho Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to tho brave porter! Ho was Ladislas ileymont creator of ‘Peasants/’ the man who told things about the simple honest liegemen of Poland’s soil in language than which no more beautiful has ever been written. Ingeborg Strom.