OLD LADY HEARS OF WAR

Taranaki Daily News, 19 January 1935, Page 18 (Supplement)

OLD LADY HEARS OF WAR

LATE NEWS IN DALMATIA. A SAD LITTLE SCENE. It happened this summer that a travel- 1 ler in Dalmatia found himself on the landing-stage of a little coastal village, waiting for the steamboat. A sprinkling of native men and women in their picturesque costumes were likewise waiting to take passage; among them was a very old woman, who sat a little apart, clutching a small bundle. Something about this elderly woman attracted the traveller, so, being familial- ' with the idiom of the country, he asked her whither she was bound. : Somev*hat haltingly she told him she < was on her way to visit her sister in : a near-by village. It appeared that ir i was 47 years since she had seen her, or indeed had come down from the hills < where she lived all . alone year in and 1 year out, with no one to speak to but J <

the beasts of the forest. She did not mind that; the beasts were her very good friends. But now that she was 30, and her sister was even older, she thought they ought to meet again. Also, she had a little money and she felt , that she would like to hand this over to her nephews and nieces. Encouraged by his interest she pulled from the heavy folds of her skirt a shabby leather pocket-book and proudly showed him its contents: 700 crowns in banknotes that were current when Francis Joseph sat on the throne of the Hapsburgs and Dalmatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire! Utterly dismayed, the traveller knew not what to say; but some of those present were less tactful than he, and speedily informed the old. lady that her treasured banknotes were . worth just nothing at all. At first she would not believe it. What would his Majesty the King say, she inquired, if he knew that the .notes which bore his picture were not considered good money? She was told that the king she was thinking of had long been in his grave, and that Dalmatia had become a part of the new country of Yugo-Slavla. .. And now it was the turn of the bystanders to be surprised, for it appeared that the old woman had not the slightest inkling of any of the great changes that have happened in the world in the last twenty years, and was ignorant even of the war which had brought them about. It might be said that life had passed her by. But had it? Perhaps she had lived more fully in the lovely calm of her mountain solitude, where the slow wise thoughts implanted in her mind by Nature’s self grew and matured as the seedlings around her. Though' the steamer came and went without her, and she was left on the landing-stage sadly fingering her worthless banknotes, she was perhaps happier when she was back again in her hut in the forest than if she had gone on and seen what the world she remembered had come to. / GOOD NEWS FOR GLASGOW. There is good news for the unemployed, for Scottish coal contains a remarkably large amount of petrol, and a nevz industry is to be started north of the Tweed. So promising was the test made on some coal by the National Coke and Oil Company that prospecting has already begun for the laying down of a coal distillation plant. Glasgow will probably be one of the chief centres where every year petrol will be extracted from 50.000 tons. of coal.