ROUND THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XXII, 30 November 1895, Page 674

ROUND THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

[with apologies to the autocrat of the breakfast TABLE.] WHEN we assembled for the morning meal, the Melancholy Man was more melancholy than usual. He said he had been recommended to try athletic sports as a cure for melancholia. He did. He swallowed a four hours’ dose and returned home looking so ‘ blue ’ that his last washerwoman, whom he hadn’t paid and was unlucky enough to meet, suggested sarcastically across the road, that be should stir himself in the tub to blue his linen and save extras. An undertaker, on the look-out for advertising boards, stopped to enquire his terms. The Melancholy Man said he felt that taking athletic sports for low spirits was about as sensible as taking a Union Company’s steamer for sea-sickness. He said that walking round the Cricket Ground of the Domain on Saturday gave him as sea-sick an impression as any heaving vessel on the ocean deep had ever done. When he made his first circumnavigation he was almost cheerful. The sun shone and the band played gaily. His lady friends greeted him with pleasant bows and smiles. Seen through a glass the thousands of moving, gaily-clad objects represented the shifting lights and colours, the innumerable lovely tints of a huge kaleidoscope. Then the sun went out to look up his country friends who didn’t want him, and forgot to shut the windows, and the rain dropped in on the town folks, who would have been equally glad to show it the door. By this idiotic arrangement the Melancholy Man got very wet. ‘ Her golden hair all hanging down her back,’ no longer had charms to soothe his savage breast. It might hang there till it Bleached, or be done up in a French roll or a German bun or a set of corkscrews—he didn’t care. His lady friends were moving, gaily-clad objects still, but alas! to his distorted rain-blurred vision, objects in another and more impolite sense. Presently the sun reappeared. This settled the Melancholy Man. He felt the weather was cheating him at the three card trick, and no matter what you backed, something else would turn up. His spirits fell to freezing point and his looks got so chilling that everyone who passed took violent colds and sneezing fits on the spot. ‘ Your experience was not uncommon,’said the Practical man. ‘ Most people who attended the sports on Saturday returned in anything but a sportive frame of mind. Yet, to my thinking the weather was not the depressing feature in Saturday’s entertainment. More deplorable is the gambling element which has already begun to gnaw like a cancer into the very core of these otherwise innocent healthy, and delightful athletic functions. The Auckland youth is no longer satisfied with his wreath of laurels. He must have heavy “stakes ” in his favour to make his race worth the running. His friends and supporters must have a financial interest in him if they are to crane their lordly necks to watch the contest, or exert their lordly lungs on his behalf. Open betting on the field is prohibited, but who can arrest the tide of this corrupting evil, which finds access in thousands of surreptitious “ sweeps ” and heavy backing, and threatens to obliterate all that is beneficial and manly and of good report in the pastimes of the young colonial ?’

‘The conversation this morning,’ remarked the Frivolous Youth, ‘reminds me of a familiar operatic “patter.”— ‘ Oh don't the days seem lank and long When all goes right and nothing goes wrong; And isn't your life extremely flat With nothing whatever to grumble at ?’ ‘ As we are all tuned up to grumbling pitch,’ said the Professor, ‘ let me add my note to the concord of sweet growls. That it represents a “ bar ” to what popular sentiment calls “Love’s Golden Dream,” all keen observers at Saturday’s gathering will agree. Stay! Since modern science refuses to admit of the tender passion, and puts it down to baccili in the auricles and ventricles and main artery, allow me to explain that I refer to the microbe which is supposed to worry around a young man’s cardiac locality in the spring. This microbe occasionally develops into a troublesome, but rarely fatal malady, called love at first sight. Now, I suppose, out of the several thousands of unattached young people who passed and re-passed each other on Saturday, all of whom, remember, were predisposed to infection, a hundred caught it. Fifty couples in love—enamoured of each other’s eyes, or curve of the ear, or inclination of the nose, or whatever it may be that inspires the divine passion. Fifty marriages made, not in heaven, but a very good substitute to folks in love—the Domain. Alas! what dispels love at first sight ? Second, mostly, and failing that, bad weather. It now appears more than probable that those marriages will continue unaccomplished facts ; the fifty fair participants remain unappropriated blessings — unappro

priated, at any rate, by the other fifty. And why ? Hear the confession made to me by a youth who “ had it ” pretty badly on Saturday, was delirious for an hour, convalescent for another, and recovered ere he went home.’ • “ I was dead gone the second I spotted her,” he said. “By gosh! she was a dandy. Fuzzy hair round her eyes, you know —all that sort of thing. Stunning laugh. Pinkish sort of dress and a ripping hat. Jove ! what a daisy I thought her. The first half-dozen times we passed I felt as bad as they make ’em—would have done it right off if there’d only been someone handy to introduce me. Then it came on to rain. Three more rounds I saw the outside of her umbrella ; fourth, the wind blew it inside out and I saw her. Somehow, I didn’t barrack round for an ‘ intro ’ after that. Her hair looked damp and ratty, and hang it all, a fellow can’t speak to a girl whose hat has gone crooked.” • After this, let grumbling cease, for who will deny that the ill-winds on Saturday blew someone good, if only the girls with “ratty” hair, and “hats gone crooked !” ’