"ALIEN'S" PERSONAL WORD TO HER READERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2808, 8 January 1908, Page 75

"ALIEN'S" PERSONAL WORD TO HER READERS.

I should like to take this opportunity of -vrishing the readers of the Witness — among whom I claim some old and dear friends — a very happy New Year. Contrasts, it is said, axe odious, but in the contrast between a New Zealand and English Christmastide the odiousness does not lie with you. _ There" you have the bountiful sunshine and incomparable beauty of mountain, lake, river, and forest, even in the loneliest backwoods farm, the unconventional free life: the. hope of life and the future is with the young. Here, all the pomp and splendour of a throne, all the old traditions visualised in ceremony ; the State and the Church twin brothers in' form, and, yes — in a great charity. A charity picturesque, and profoundly religious in its sentiment ; but beneath the picturesqueness of the festal season a great and tragic need — a need so tremendous that all which is done but touches its edge. Our merriest Christmas sees the beggar at the doorstep. It is true that we have art and music and literature to charm the hours of frost and gloom ; but the lover of Nature would give it all for the picnic- in the fern groves, the camp at the lake shore, or mountain climb. So round the picnic baskets eat, drkik, and be merry, with happy hope 'for the freedom of a free land, where a man's future depends upon his individual industry and talent. And to all those friends in the nooks and corners of the lonely mountains and in the cities of the hills and streams 1 wish all happiness and prosperity. — Yours in remembrance,