MOSCOW’S UNDERGROUND.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 March 1934, Page 22 (Supplement)

MOSCOW’S UNDERGROUND.

ITS BOY AND GIRL WORKERS. Children are certainly given every opportunity in Russia to take an active part in progressive movements. Thousands of them are now at work on Moscow’s underground. This will be Russia’s first underground railway, and very badly it is needed, for would-be passengers hang on to the backs and sides of Moscow’s trams like flies, clinging for dear life. So such a railway Moscow must have, and 2a,500 workers are busy on it, several hundred young girls among them. In addition to these young enthusiasts, who obtained permission from school, factory, or office before being transferred to work in the depths of the earth, many young folk have given up their free day from other duties to help things along. The line, begun in the autumn of 1932, is planned to see its first part completed by November. Owing to various causes, including the narrowness of the streets and the varied and frequently difficult nature of the subsoil, part of the underground is not really under the ground at all, but adopts the method of open construction. THE ANCIENT SAGE. « EUROPE'S OLDEST DOCTOR. The New Year was still young in Northern Italy when the old doctor who had seen 107 New Year dawns closed Hs eyes to open them no more. Old Doctor Giovanni Gortani was i looked on with pride in the province where Venice and Ravenna are proud monuments of antiquity as one of its ancient and honoured relics. It was claimed for him that he was the oldest doctor in Europe. : - The fine old gentleman was also proud of it, and when a journalist on his hundredth birthday told him a Paris doctor < claimed to be older he indignantly denied it. Till he was ninety he went on work-’-ing, and in the war the lively little man with the white beard was as familiar and welcome a figure in the wards of a hospital as he had been in many a cottage . home. . ■ In the district of Aquileia, where he lived and died, malaria is still common £ and exacts a yearly toll of lives. H® had become a specialist in its treatment, But he was the present help in trouble of many a sufferer from lesser ills before. Garibaldi had made a United Italy. 3-; v