The New Zealand Graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1890.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 52, 27 December 1890, Page 10

The New Zealand Graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1890.

By the time that this issue of The New Zealand Graphic appears to the public view we shall all be engaged in the •celebration of another Christmas. To the young the Christinas season looms up great and eventful. It is that one in which the holidays are the longest, the hearts of elder relatives are the softest, while old Santa Claus is wont to emerge in a curious and inexplicable manner, coming as a thief in the night, but with a generosity most uncharacteristic of the ordinary burglar, leaving behind him more than he takes away. To the more youthful members of society Christmas approaches all the more agreeably liecause of the distance which seems to separate it from that one which preceded it. To children at school the period of three hundred and sixty days appeals an eternity, and were the juvenile mind more given to dwelling upon the pleasures to come than on those that are, the misery of hope long delayed would make many a young heart sick.

Gray says, ‘ ’Tis man who joy alone descries with forward and reverted eyes,’ but this faculty of prospect and retrospect is a two-edged one, and according as temperaments are sad or cheerful it elevates or depresses the spirit. ■Children are less prone to thought than are mature persons, and are so much the happier in that the present bulks moie largely on their view than either the past or the future. We insensibly grow stale with frequent repetitions, and to those of us who have survived many Christmas dinners, balls, tennis-parties, fetes, fights, sights, and shipwrecks, or who have enjoyed several sentences at the hands of a judge of the Supreme Court, or experienced the milder excitements of repeated bankruptcy, the enthusiasm of the youngsters at this season will appear a thing to be envied.

Like most of the ancient feasts, fasts, and holydays peculiar to the people from whom they are sprung, Christmas is gradually losing much of its significance for the young societies of Greater Europe. With the Scotch, the French, and the Americans Christmastide passes almost unremarked, their attention being exclusively concentrated upon the celebration of the New Year. Then Sandy seizes the opportunity of taking an extra skinful of whisky, Alphonse sallies forth bearing in his arms presents for his lady friends, while Jonathan hires a coupe and goes around partaking of hospitality so lavish that he often concludes the day in quite a deplorable plight.

It is in Germany, Scandinavia, and England that the old traditions of Christmas still survive, and wherever a number ■of colonists bred in these lands are congregated, the observance of Christmastide is most strictly pursued. In those lands it is essentially the children’s festival ami the season of family gatherings. Though now appearing under a Christian guise, what we know as Christmas was originally the great heathen festival of mid-winter, held in celebration of the approaching return of the sun toward the earth. In regions such as those of the North of Europe, the knowledge that the turning-point of winter had been reached, that the days would soon Iregin to lengthen, and the dreary cold would shortly vanish in the exulierance and brightness of returning spring, was calculated to create a feeling of cheerfulness in the minds of people whose appliances for combating the rigours of nature were none of the l>est. At ancient Koine the season extended throughout seven daysIn these were celebrated three separate festivals—the Saturnalia, the Opalia, and the Sigillaria. The Saturnalia was a short paroxysm of liberty, fraternity, and equality ; the < *palia a festival in honour of the Mother of tire Earth ;

the Sigillaria the festival of children in which little earthenware figures were sold as toys. From these are doubtless descended most of the practices in connection with Christ-

mas. But in Australasia the meaning of all these old customs is gradually being lost sight of, and just as the belief in legends and fairy tales grows every year more faint in the minds of the young colonial population, so does the exaggerated reverence for Christmastide decline. There is no likeness between the condition of our relatives in Europe and that of ourselves on this side of the world at the present season. Even as we write the softest of summer breezes is coursing beneath the sweetest of summer skies, there is the scent of flowers everywhere from tables within and from gardens without, pretty yachts speed over the face of the bluest of waters, while the strains of Gounod's ‘ Serenade,’ rising from the itinerant orchestra below-, conjures sensations of the ideal Italian sort far from resembling the conventional Christmas associations.

The glories of the jolly old-fashioned Christmas like those of our first sweetheart or our fifteenth (or of any other of those we had in the days when every month brought its fresh visitation of that inevitable disease), seem wondrously tame on re-encountering them after years of cruel separation. So far from sitting down and weeping over the irrevocable past, we are content to accept it as having been not unprovidentially disposed for ourselves, and feel thankful that we have done no worse. So in the full enjoyment of the beauties of our glorious summer-time here those of us who have known the very questionable attractions presented by the motherland at Christmastide, may placidly r esign themselves to the pleasures which Zealandia strews so prodigally around and inculcate the doctrine of contentment in those to whom these pleasures have perhaps become commonplace.

What constitutes a mendicant? In most communities the habitual beggar who follows the calling as a professions j has long been subject to some sort of penalty. In the reign of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth the sturdy beggar convicted of a second offence was branded, and for a third was incontinently hanged. Weare not perfectly sure as to the graduation of the scale of pains and penalties, but we are as to the main fact that the persistent beggar then came to the drop with much more certainty than the homicide does now.

But morality, like manners, is a movable feast. In certain parts of Turkestan the love-sick maiden walks coolly into the tent of her inamorata, and, sitting down, keeps him out until he has screwed up his courage to the proposing point, which he, no doubt, speedily does. This notion of ejectment as a means of securing an action for breach of promise strikes us as being very peculiar, but in those parts it excites no surprise. In Japan, if a person is insulted, he rips himself up, while in America he outs with his shooting-iron and promptly perforates the offender. The Chinese son who does not pay his father’s debts is eternally disgraced, while in America and these colonies a skilfully-executed bankruptcy by your father is the indication of a successful business aptitude likely to result in his leaving you a large fortune with no surviving obligations towards his creditors.

A Japanese woman, when she marries, turns over quite a new leaf, shaves her head and blackens her teeth that she may no longer prove dangerous to outsiders. European women reverse the process. Those of some nationalities arm for serious conquest as soon as they are mar ried ; those of the English breed, while they keep a sharp eye upon their own husbands, are not averse to acquiring a reputation for asicklysortof flirtation withtransient ‘lions.’ Aludicrous instanceof this English feminine inconsistency occurred some ten years ago at one of the fashionableyacht clublralls at Home. A young married woman gotthe ‘lion’of the season—anexplorer who had dined not wisely but too well—all to herself. In this, the coveted moment, she incautiously asked him if, in the parts he had visited, the untutored belle saueage knew how to kiss. He at once proceeded to a practical demonstration, with the result that there was a. fracas in the supper-room, and a scandal which kept everybody delighted for a fort-

night. We should like to hear the opinion of a Chinese or Japanese matron regarding the behaviour of such ladies as these.

But anent of the practice of begging. While in respect of the ‘ pro' we maintain some of the stringency of our forefathers, with reference to the amateur mendicant we are curiously lenient. Here we have developed the same distinction which growing subtlety of analysis has erected between theft and kelptomauia. When a pauper steals a loaf in order to live he is punished for theft; when a gorged aiderman walks off with a silver napkin-ring he is released on the plea of kleptomania The increasing spirit of liberty in women, combined with the still surviving courtesy pair! by men to their weakness, has developed a sort of idea that women are free to exercise the solicitation of a pushing insurance agent while escaping the refusals to which he is subject.

This form of amateur mendicancy, originally fostered by the clergy, is now being imported into every sort of society enterprise in which women take any interest. There is nothing from a church bazaar, a Sunday-school picnic, a benefit forsome impecunious nobody, or a boating-club concert, to a ball for the purpose of providing old women with comfortable underclothing, but a legion of harpies, fascinating or otherwise, go scouring the country for miles round and ‘ sticking up ’ disinterested outsiders in a manner approaching to shameless. Men in offices are victimised by strange females for causes of which they never heard and of which they never want to hear again. If a man is particularly anxious to get his pocket picked, or to obtain a black eye, or to buy scrip in some wild cat mine, he knows where to go to satisfy his desires ; but there is no predicting the spot in which the lady mendicant will strike you. That would surpass the prevision of our ‘ lightning ’ meteorologist, Mr \V ragge. Formerly Providence tempted you with her at the bazaar if you chose to go there, but now Society is like a place in which fifty bazaars have been let loose, and men are only safe when up to their necks in deep water and out of sight of land.

One can understand a man submitting to be ‘ dunned ’ for his sweetheart’s hobby, or his sister’s, or his friend’s, or his wife’s, or even by a very pretty woman who wont stick at trifles ; but W'hy, in the name of reason, everybody wearing the semblance of a female should be at liberty to solicit every man, who looks as if he would ‘ bleed ’ to advantage for a cause he knows not or even dislikes, and also have the privilege of abusing him immeasurably if he refuses, is reversing the position of the sexes with a vengeance. It is said that the monasteries promoted begging anciently. It is certainly true that modern churches promote mendicancy of this description. Whether begging is only a legal offence when it is followed for the purposeot keeping life in the applicant isaquestion for the courts; and is the practice pushed much farther, the day’ must surely come when some modern Hampden will rise and strike for the deliverance of men from this tyranny in an authoritative decision of the criminal courts.

* Confound it ! Why, that doctor is a regular pelican 1 ‘Pelican? What do you mean ?’ ‘ Look at the size of his bill.’ Old Cross beak : ‘ That young Callcash is absolutely irrepressible. 1 have almost insulted him to get him to keep away from here; but he actually won’t be sat upon.’ Little Willie : ‘ Oh, yes, he will. Ask Maud if he won’t !’ Maud : ‘ Willie, there are the Bagley boys whistling for you to come and play 1’ Tommy (at the dinner table): ‘Mr Johnson, are you blind?’ Air Johnson: ‘No, my boy, why do you ask?’ Tommy : ‘ Why, nothin’, only sister said you’d get your eyes opened if you married that Jones girl.’