NIGHT.

Otago Witness, Issue 3031, 17 April 1912, Page 73

NIGHT.

I hold that in every day of our lives Nature provides us something beautiful, if we can but Bee it. But for many of us life has become such an unnatural business, and the struggle for existence, which in older times took men aoroad by woods and streams and instructed them in the very secrets of Nature, so drives us into cities and pens us within walls that our opportunities for "seeing crow less and less. . What happens in the daytime, unless it blows a gale, or rains, or floods the world with glorious sunshine, we only discover when the lunch hour comes. Yet all the time a moving picture show, different every day from every other day in all the three hundred and sixtyfive, and changing every hour of the twelve, is in progress. Country dwellers, whose very life and the crown of their labour is bound up in the benefactions of the seasons, note each change of wind, the banking up of the clouds in the rainy quarter, the clearing of the sky for frost, the soft grey mists sweeping up from the sea, the slow gathering of the «' Mackerel scales and mares' tails across the blue, which presently will make " Lofty ships to carry low sails." But for the townsfolk, the " continuous morning picture show " of Nature is necessarily an unregarded thing through all the working liours of the day. When evening ushers in night, and toil is over for that day, then it is that one notices the tremendous difference between night in the city and night in the country—a difference as deep and wide as lies between the day time atmosphere of town and country. Here in town one realises that man, like the wild beasts of jungle and desert, stalks his prey at night, sheltered bv the darkness. Dimly one recalls the 'declaration that in the night the dumb brutes " seek their meat from God." And we know them equipped for that difficult, search, in which might is right, by wonderful gifts of scent and hearing which are at once so delicate and so unerring that they almost bear the semblance of reason. The domestic animals on the contrary, accustomed through long generations to be provided for by their master, man, rest in full security through the hours of darkness. Thus there is, in the country, an ineffable sense of peace and holiness about night. On dark and stormy nights perhaps, too, a slight sense of loneliness, but on moonlight or star-lit nights, how near the stars with their friendly shining, how all-encompassing the broad flood of marvellous moonlight which glorifies the simple commonplaces of sea and shore to unearthly, unfamiliar beauty. In the city a different side of life awakens with the night, especially the beautiful nights when the lights of the city burn red and garish in the white moonlight that floods the streets. Masses of black shadow cast by rare trees, and frequent buildings, lie across the footways of the residential suburbs, and in every nook, by every shadowed gateway, by fences, and steps, and sauntering slowly, slowly along, you meet the moonlighters, man and maid. It is so natural that after the day's toil, after the long hours of being within doors, the "solitude a deux," the beauty of the night, the charm of the fresh night air should attract both man and maid. And yet . . . And yet ... It is so obvious that of all these attractions the only one that appeals to him and to her, is that " solitude of two." They have no eyes for all the magic and the beauty of a" moon-washed world, they are never seen looking at this or that. Arms about one another, in every possible variety of affectionate support, they lurk in the shadows, whispering, a strange mixture of boldness and ashamedness. Their walks are ordered far from home, or else they are so avowedly " keeping company" that these "unlimited osculations, and promiscuous caresses" are accounted permissible in the circles to which they belong. But in any case, they point to this: there is something radically wrong with the man or boy who is willing to expose a girl to the unfavourable and contemptuous remarks of passers-by, whether they are personal strangers or not. There is something more wrong still with the girl who is content to stand at gateways, lurk in

the shadows or pace the footpaths with a man's arm around her, even though that man is her lover. Some day he may be her husband; and if he is, he will not think any the better of her, or trust her truth and honour any the more, she may be sure, because she cheapened her pride and self-respect for him before marriage. The streets are not the place for love-making, nor can you expect any very fine sense of self respect and morality from those who are content to use them thus. Indeed, one has no hesitation in saying that the girls who submit to these public demonstrations of affection have already lost the fine edge of their self respect, the bloom of their modesty. The sad part of it is that so many of these "moonlighters"—l cannot call them /'lovers,-' for lovers true lovers, are among the sweetest things in the world—are mere chits of girls. Precocious little girls who should be safely at home under their mother's care. And of the older girls, perhaps you say they are in service, and so have no place in which to receive the young man whom they intend to mairy; or they are in shops or factories, perhaps boarded out, perhaps with only a crowded little home from which they are glad to escape. Which may be all quite true without in any way affecting my contention that every girl should be taught from her childhood a sense of self respect and personal pride which will enable her to make men —even the man she is going to marry —treat her with deference and self respect. All we can do to strengthen such a feeling among our girls, in every class, is womanly work, well done, for in these girls we see the future mothers of the nation. EMMELINE.