GUIDE NOTES

Southland Times, Issue 23948, 14 October 1939, Page 15

GUIDE NOTES

By

BIG GUIDE

“It is a wise man who has his afterthoughts first.” All Guides who intend to enter for the first-class test in November, as well as those who have already entered, must note that the first-class hike will be taken as soon as entries are sent in. Those who intend to enter should send in their names to Miss H. Taylor, Lewis street, immediately instead of waiting for the end of the month. We have been asked to publish the following suggestion in connection with the present international crisis. “There has been formed throughout the Empire a League of Prayer, whose membership in Great Britain alone is more than 2,000,000. All that each member has to do is this—at noon, wherever he is or whatever he is doing, he repeats this short, _ simple, prayer: ‘Give peace for all time, O Lord, and fill my heart and the hearts of all people everywhere, with the love of Christ. Amen.’ We know that two Invercargill companies have already decided to use this prayer individually. At a time of great national stress such as this, do we not all feel inspired to join our prayers for peace to those of millions of others, especially when we realize that approximately every hour of the day this same prayer is going out from some part of our far-flung Empire?” NATURE NOTES The leaves of the fuchsia are soft and thin, green above and silver below. They are unusual for a native in that they fall in winter. Nearly all New Zealand trees are evergreen, the only trees we see bare in winter being those introduced from other countries. The fuchsia, however, is one of the two or three natives that follow this fashion, especially if it is growing in the colder southern or mountainous parts. The Maoris were keen observers of nature and they noticed the fuchsia strange habit. “Where were you at the fall of the kotukutuku?” they would ask the idler who had been absent when he was needed in the kumera planting season. The fuchsia grows everywhere in this country; a smallish tree with twisted trunk and brittle branches. The wood is 1 too full of knots to be of any use to the builder. As firewood nothing could be worse. “Bucket-of-water wood” it has been called, and no camper who knows anything would put it on his fire. There is a story of a fuchsia trunk being used as a back log to a fire for a whole year. When it was at last thrown out as useless, it put forth fresh shoots and grew into a new tree!