Editor's Walls

Otago Witness, Issue 3889, 25 September 1928, Page 83

Editor's Walls

CHANGING WEATHER. Blood tells—at least in the fancy of some people who think more of birth than of plain ability. Young Benson was calling on the village belle one evening. Her father, a crusty old curmudgeon, stumped into the parlour just as things were getting pleasant, and sat down in a rocker by the stove. “ Looks like snow, sir.” said young Benson, trying to be sociable. “ Nuthin’ of the kind,” grunted the old man. Benson was squelched. A terrible silence reigned. Then the old man by the stove awoke out of a kind of reverie. He looked at Benson hard, and said: “ What’s your name, son ? ” “Livermore Benson, sir,” said the visitor. “What? Old Reuben Benson’s son?” “ Yes. sir.” “ Well, well,” said the old man. “ It may snow, it may snow.” L* A NEW RESTAURANT. When the new Hungarian restaurant is built, in London I hope it will be able to provide those enormous slices of water melon that are so popular in the restaurants of Budapest. A slice of these melons is very filling (says a Daily Chronicle writer), although it has no lasting effect. The flavouring of paprika (sweet pepper) in most of the dishes is inevitable. but if the proprietors are wise they will also allow Londoners to taste the Hungarian peasant bread. Like the melons, the peasant loaves are huge, and I found this bread—l had a hunch of it given me by a peasant sitting outside Budapest station—much more enjoyable than the more refined variety. WORLD’S CHAMPION AUTO GRAPH HUNTER. It is believed that the world’s champion autograph hunter is Joseph F. Mikulec, of Croatian origin, now a naturalised American citizen. For the past 27 years he has travelled the globe collecting the signatures of the world’s great men. He has the autographs of United States Presidents, kings, prime ministers, ambassadors, legislators, industrial magnates, authors, editors, explorers, inventors, religious leaders—in short, almost everyone of distinction. Having filled several albums, Mr Mikulec now travels around with a huge volume weighing half a hundredweight, and requiring a special truck to move it about. The son of a poor Croatian woodchopper, Mr Mikulec has been on tramp since his boyhood, and the first 15 years of his autograph collecting were spent on foot. In addition to his native tongue. he speaks English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and a little Japanese. He is preparing material for a book describing his adventures, and in the meantime supports himself by lectures. A TRUE “TALL” STORY. Everyone knows the tale of the sardine that blocked the harbour at Marseilles. It is one of the most hoary tales worked on visitors to that famous city—famous for tall stories as well as for many other things. But now (says the Morning Post) it seems that this classic jest is true after all. It was a corvette, La Sardine, that fought in the French revolutionary wars. Toulon was being besieged by the French, held as it wms by a British fleet and army, and to prevent the latter from effecting a diversion at Marseilles La Sardine put herself in the mouth of the harbour and was scuttled by her captain’s orders. WISDOMETTES. “A bird in the hand ” is very bad table manners. o O O • Self-made men generally employ ’varsity tutors to make their sons. coo There is nothing like a cool reception for making a man feel hot. o o o A youth always wishes he were older and a woman wishes she were younger. o o o One half the world doesn’t know how the other half lives—but it’s got its suspicions. o o o The girl who marries a man to reform him generally spoils a good husband for some other girl. o o o When a man falls in love at first sight, he had better wipe his glasses and take a second look. WEIGHT AND SEA. What are the qualities necessary for a, liftboatman? Some quaint views were expressed by young competitors in a lifeboat prize essay competition recently. Here are a few: — “A lifeboatman must not be too fat and not too thin; too much flesh is a burden, and his weight would smash fragile things if he trod on them; but a little flesh helps to keep him warm on a eold night.” “A lifeboatman should be a sea-dog to his last hair.” “ He must not be selfish and grab the best seats.” “ He must know the front of the boat from the back.” “Among little things a lifeboatman should not have are wives or a child.” ‘ A lifeboatman should always be prepared to give his beauty sleep for others.”

THE BETRAYAL. Captain Cooper reined his horse, and looked down at the kneeling Martha. Martha wrung out her flannel, and looked up at the captain. He would never be a graceful horseman, but he sat the great bay he was riding easily enough. He looked fit to lead in a better cause than that in which he was now engaged. He said: “It seems to take a long time to clean.” She answered quickly: “There’s some cleans what they don’t dirty, an’ there’s some as dirties what they don’t clean.” There was a possibility of meaning here which he did not probe. Instead he asked: “Where’s the gaffer?” “ I’m gaffer here,” she answered shortly. “ Come, missus, you don’t live here alone.” “ The children’s up for the berries in Cowley Wood. They don’t stay at home all day,” she said. Captain Cooper looked at her veteran figure and at the meagre, burn-scarred face, with the straggy wisps of greying hair around it . . . then the long line of horses were in motion again. Martha turned into the house. The clatter of horses became fainter. She heard a. shout from the valley. She looked pleased. Davy was a good boy 1 The first house beyond the ruined village stood well back from the road. . . . It had been rebuilt sufficiently to give shelter. Smoke came from a stovepipe chimney. They saw a woman running to seek refuge in the copse. Some warning she must have had, for she was already in flight when they came into view of the house. The bay horse plunged, and the captain kept his seat with difficulty. There was the report of a rifle. The captain saw a red mark on the horse’s counter where the bullet had scored it. He was not lacking in courage. “ Come on, men,” he shouted. They clattered down the road to the gate. 1 The man did not wait to fire again, I when he saw how his first shot had been « received. He ran out of the back of the house after the woman. A stern word from the captain checked the pursuit, which would have scattered his men to so inadequate a purpose. “ Forward,” he said, “ and keep together. You know the orders.” They went on down the road. —S. Fowler Wright, in “ Deluge.” HIS LAST ORDER. The man in the corner of the fashionable restaurant was certainly not the sort of person who usually dined there, but (as the head water remarked to the chef) a smart appearance isn’t always possessed by those with the most money nowadays. “Waiter,” called the seedy diner, “ fetch me a nice piece of boiled turbot J ” The fish was brought and consumed. Then: “Waiter, fetch a choice piece of curried fowl.” The fowl was procured. “ Waiter, fetch another bottle of wine.” The’bill mounted up, but still the seedy one consumed one dainty after another. At last he lit a cigar and leant back. “ Waiter ! ” he called. “ Fetch your bill, sir ? ” inquired the waiter. “No,” came the languid answer; “fetch a policeman. I’ve no money with which to pay the bill.” A VISION. “ The sitting moon passed through an open casement and lit up a little room, with an old table piano at one side and a table with a bowl of flowers at the other, and between the two by the fire a boy, standing with his back towards me. I could see only his short black hair, red neck, blue jersey, and brown bare legs, but the poise I knew at once was that of a boy whom I had not seen since I also was 10 years old. Thirty years ago I promised to go with him to rob a kestrel’s nest, but the day appointed came and I did not go. I cannot remember why: I never saw him again till now. He seemed to be crying, and I thought that it was because I had disappointed him. And now I understood it was no use. I was sorry, and at first eager to ease myself with the bitter happiness of telling him so, but I did not move. He would not know me in my absurd developments, my beard, my sword, and all the rest. I had hoped that perhaps his tears were sweet by this time, and that he was crying more for luxury than for sadness, and I started most silently to go out when he also moved and said, ‘ You have come at last, let us go.’ I did not see his face as he spoke, and before I could turn and look at him —your question, Oliver, took away both the room and the dream. Now I can see the lights of Gordon’s house. I shall ask him if he remembers Llewelyn—that little boy in the jersey. All those years I had forgotten him, but perhaps Gordon knows something about him. I wonder is he alive. Somehow, when 1 recall him, I cannot believe that he ever grew up: he was strong as a mountain pony and rash. Something—l cannot explain; only I cannot picture the man, however much I try. It is as if his had been a face and figure not destined to turn into a man, that is all. After all, I don’t think I will ask either. . . Edward Thomas, in “ Cloud Castle,” from Twentieth Century Essays. When frightened, rabbits stamp several time s on the ground with the hind feet, making a sound which can be heard a ' long way off. This is a danger signal to their fellow-rabbits, who scamper off , to safety.

TEA IN CHINA. The Chinese drink tea and they smoke cigarettes. Ancient and modern customs are thus combined to guide social functions. The best tea comes from China. All the Chinese, rich and pool 1 alike, drink tea. Tea is the national beverage. Common courtesy centres around the cup that cheers. Enter any home anywhere, and they get busy at once to offer the guest the necessary mark of hospitality. The tea is made with boiling water in a little pot—not necessarily a fresh brew —the pot is always in use. Your cup is placed before you—no handle to it, and no milk or sugar. Before you drink you turn politely, and with as much formality as you can muster, to the head of the family, and also to as many others as you can possibly notice, and invite each in turn to drink. Strangers may be watching you (it is not rude to stare) and will be delighted if you turn to them and say, “ Ching-ching.” Then you sip. Your manners are tested and trained by the way you drink tea in China. It is very rude to drink a whole cup of tea first lap ! The cigarette is now in common use. It is an interloper—-entirely foreign to China, and its use has brought many complications. You may smoke all the time — probably your host will if you don’t — and the gilt is off the gingerbread. Etiquette lias deteriorated tremendously. The gentleman in China thinks this foreign way of smoking a very frivolous custom, and courtesies suffer accordingly. —S. Henderson Smith, in the Woman’s Magazine. IF. Mr Brown surprised his daughter when she was in the act of embracing her young man in the front room. “ When I was courting Mrs Brown,” he said severely, “ she sat on one side of the room and I sat on the other side.” “ So would I,” replied the young man, “ if I had been courting Mrs Brown.”

“ NO HAWKERS: NO CIRCULARS.” Venders of cabbages, buttons, and pins, Mangles or music or boot-blacking tins, Mufiins and crumpets, clothes-props or logs, Birthday cards, garden plants, photographs, dogs, Fellows with circulars cracking up pills, Furniture, drinkables, cures for all ills, Puffs of the playhouse and prime butcher’s meat, Enter not here, but pass on down the street ! Charlatans cadging for something for naught, Gossips who whisper some scandal unsought, Tellers of stories much better unheard, Camouflage merchants who can’t keep their word, Hucksters political seeking a vote, Bores who desire to push jokes down my throat, Confidence tricksters who live but to cheat, Enter not here, but pass on down the street ! People who think they’re the salt of the earth, Snobs who have nothing to boast of but birth, Seekers of cheap, meretricious applause, Men who will keep anything but the laws, Rifflers, philanderers, flirts of each sex, Watchers for anything they can annex, Blighters who deem virtue quite obsolete, Enter not here, but pass on down the street ! —A. B. Cooper, in Answers. LADIES OF THE OLD REGIME. “ These fine ladies have but one virtue only,” writes Ernest Raymond in John o’ London’s Weekly Summer Reading Number, “the virtue (and it is no little one) of the grand manner. It enabled them, no matter how they bad lived, to die in the high Roman fashion. Our authors drop their curtain before La Guillotine rises in the Place de la Concorde; but the exquisite hauteur which sent one famous lady up the steps of the scaffold ‘ smelling a rose to keep off the smell of the common people ’ is seen here, awaiting its grand opportunity, in the pictures they give us of Death being received with courtesy into milady’s bedchamber, where she had received so many other fine gentlemen before. The Sacrament is announced: ‘Madame, le bon Dieu is without; will you allow Him to be admitted? He would wish the honour of administering to you.’ And some of the women struggle up in their beds to receive Him as a King; others wave Him away as the God of the common people.”

‘ FISHY! The angler with an elastic imagination was spinning his usual yarn at the club. “ Yes,” he said, “it was the biggest fish I have ever hooked—and before I realised it I was pulled right out of the boat.” “ You must have got a nasty wetting,” declared one of the listeners. “ Oh, not a bit of it,” replied the angler; “ You see, I fell on the fish I ” HOWLERS. “A demagogue was a bulging vessel from which the ancients drank beer.” “ ‘ D.C.’ at the end of a piece of music means ‘ Don’t Clap.’ ” “An oxygen has eight sides.” “Water may be made hard by freezing, and the hardness removed by boiling it.” “If it is noon and the sun is straight above you, you are north.” “ Geometry teaches us how to bisex angels.”

VICTORIAN FANS. The demure, slightly Victorian type of evening frock favoured by the debutantes of the season demands accessories which are in keeping with the old-world effect of the gown, and in consequence (says the Morning Post) small fans are creeping into favour. Exquisite old fans which have lain in some cupboard for years are produced and carried with pride, and painted muslin, chicken skin, or lace are all permissible again. Modern fans, which for so long have been made solely of feathers are now designed in lace and sequins to accompany picture frocks, and the tiny satin models with sticks of mother-o’-pearl are copied from museum specimens. A beautiful fan in the graceful Spanish shape is made of fine gold braid lace applique to a background of gold net, and the sticks are of fine wood carved and gilded to match. HOW TO MAKE SURE. Ethel Gotrox: “Oh, Reginald, they say you are a fortune-hunter, and are only marrying me for my wealth. Tell me it is not true.” Lord Dedbroke: “Why, my dearest, I would marry you if you were penniless.” Ethel Gotrox: “Prove this, my own Reginald, and I shall be absolutely happy.” Lord Dedbroke: “ Settle the whole of your vast fortune upon me, leave yourself destitute, and I will wed you in the face of the whole world.”

THE PHANTOM SHIPS. A rocky shore is a wonderful place for day-dreams, where old ships, that no longer go to sea, lie moored in disused harbours, and, lifted by the slow-moving tide, keep whispering in their sleep to each other of the strange, strange secrets of the trackless waterways and the lost islands they will pass by no more. Perhaps you sometimes fancied that if you could have interpreted their unknown speech, you might have heard stories of the phantom ships, and who were their mariners, and of the doings of the dead sea-kings who have sailed away to undiscovered deeps. Surely there would be a shore where you lay as a child and saw, looming above the inaccessible cliffs, your castle in the air; and where the radiant feet of the sun beat out a golden road over the inflowing tide you watched for the sails of the sinister ships of the lawless ones. Of course, you were always victorious when they came, when they rushed up the hill-slope to your castle. Your watchmen always were ready with their showers of arrows, and your keepers of the courtyard always had the drawbridge up in time. Then you would ride through the city with your trumpeters before you. and your knights and servitors and all the people would throng around you, praising your'valorous deeds. And then, of course, there were the spoils of war—the chests of the treasure and the jewels and the cloth.of gold and the ivory and the fragrant spices. Those were for the princess, who was beautiful and proud and bright as a star, and was served with knightly devotion and on bended knee, for so it is with princesses in the castles in the air.—Marion W. Simpson, in the Sunday at Home. TAMING A CROCODILE. Is there any animal in the world so wild as to be untamable ? It is no longer possible to answer Yes” so confidently as might have been done a few years ago. for an lift crocodile has been tamed by a native fisherman in Africa. The crocodile, which has its home in Lake Victoria, near Kampala, comes out of the water when the fisherman calls him, and allows sightseers to crowd round him without taking action of the kind usually associated with his tribe. But that, perhaps, is because he prefers " s h as a diet.. If so, his friendship with the fisherman is a paying one, for visitors always supply him with fish, which they buy from' the fisherman for the purpose. And as they pay top prices the native showman ” is rapidly growing wealthy.

A HOPELESS CONTEST! Snip, snap, snip ! the scissors go, As Phyllis plies them gaily. She seems to me to make, you know, A new frock almost daily. She buys a yard of something bright, And puts it on the table, And cuts around it left and right, As fast as she is able. And then she fetches her machine, And sets it wildly whirring; And not a hint I yet have seen, Of any hitch occurring. She makes a buttonhole or so, She has an iron heated, And almost ere you can say “ Bo ! ” The frock is there, completed I And I, I sit with envy mute. How can she work so slickly ? I wish that I could make a suit As cleverly and quickly. But she wins praise for every frock That quite rewards her labours; While I should be a laughing-stock To all my friends and neighbours. —C. E. 8., in Home Chat. LUCK! First Coster: “Well, poor old Bill’s gone ! ” Second Coster (scornfully): “Poor, indeed ! Luckiest bloke in the market. Couldn’t touch nuffink without it turned to money. Insured ’is ’ouse—burned in a month. Insured ’isself again’ accidents—broke ’is arm first week. Joined the burial society last Friday, and now ’e’s ’opped it. I calls it luck ! THE WISE FOOL. A benevolent old lady was paying a visit of inspection to a certain mental home which she had endowed. In the gardens she came across a youth-ful-looking inmate fast asleep in a' hammock. Why aren’t you working with the rest, my boy ? ” asked the old lady tartly. eraz y ” came the candid answer. “ But surely crazy people can work ? ” argued the other, pointing to some of the toilers. “ Maybe,” replied the youthful-looking one, ‘ but I ain’t as crazy as that.” LITTLE CARDENS. He has not lived in vain whose patch of ground In summer time one touch of beauty shows, Who, loving blossoms, labours for a rose And builds a bed and winds a path around. Not in success alone man’s worth is found, Nor in the tasks by which his fortune grows, But in those things wherein his spirit glows, The simpler joys by which his life is crowned. Who loves a garden, keeps it for itself And sets himself the tasks which it requires, s . ee k s no gi’eat reward of fame or pelf. lis love of beauty which his soul inspires. The little gardens humble people make Proclaim the souls who toil for beauty’s sake. —Edgar A. Guest, in Tit Bits. PROOF POSITIVE. She was what is called a “ good shopper.” That meant that she drove nearly every salesman in the shops she entered to distraction with her demands. She was never satisfied unless she had tp® A 'k°le stock of the shop turned upside down for her convenience. Last week she was buying a fur. After nearly an hour’s hesitation she at length hit on one that she hated a little less than the others. “Are you sure this fur won’t shrink,” she inquired. “If it rains and one gets caught without an umbrella it might, you know.” Madam,” replied the long-suffering salesman with a weary sigh, “the fur didn t shrink on the last party that wore it, and he was never known to carry an umbrella.”