DAYS OF FREEDOM

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1641, 14 May 1925, Page 2

DAYS OF FREEDOM

(By a Happy Guest, in the Daily Mail.)

"Such a perfectly glorious holiday! Never before have I really enjoyed being a guest. I have been completely happy, completely free, and I am so completely grateful. Please, may I come again soon?"

Thus Joan, described by the majority of her friends as the most "difficult " guest they had ever entertained. She was leaving, with obvious regret, the beautiful cottage in .Sussex where, for a whole month, we had been fellow guests sharing an autumn holiday.

"And. all that," commented our amused hostess, "because I left her alone!"

But how many of our hostesses leave us alone? Rather do they not continually torment us with plans, previously prepared, for our entertainment? Do they not frequently snatch us from the most congenial occupations in order to meet iocal magnates, whom we shock as greatly as they bore us, and make us wish that we had never fled our familiar paths? But there in that pleasant Sussex cottage life was "not so ordered. A substantial, entirely satisfying breakfast, heralded by early-morning tea at 7, was served at 8 o'clock. Prom that hour until dinner at 8 in the evening we were entirely free, and occupied the long hours blissfully doing whatever pleased us most. Did the pang of hunger assail us before the ordinary luncheon hour, then, in the spitless, low-ceilinged kitchen, was to be found an appetising array of cold meats flanked by jars of generous capacity filled with good beer and draught cider. One came in when one chose and ate what one chose.

At dinner guests, host, and hostess joyously assembled, slad to be together again and eager to discuss the doings of the day. Around the great wood fire, glowing and scented, in the wonderful old ingle-nook, itself so suggestive of good-fellowship, we all told marvellous stories, more or less true, of the adventures that had been ours.

Gould the average country hostess but realise that her town guests, weary of town life, only demand freedom—freedom in which to Toam, to work, or evan only to loaf—how beautiful and smooth would be the path of both hostess and guest!