What’s the Use?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 4, 27 July 1910, Page 36

What’s the Use?

To play the piano for the longest time on record seems a dangerous ideal. Till lately, piano-players might be trusted at least to play only .is long as they wanted to play, or as long as a musicmaster insisted upon, or as long as their friends would allow. Now a pianist may approach the instrument a little too much with the same spirit that the great Dando once tackled, his oysters. “I'p to his time,” says a worthy chronicler, “people had contented themselves with eating as many dozens as they wanted to eat; but he introduced the principle of competition, and became the

ch.impion oyster-eater/’ Competition, in our day, has even invaded the ballroom. A waltzing endurance contest is one of the new things in America, and in one case sixteen couples nobly persevered until they all fell to the floor from sheer fatigue. At another “Marathon Dance,” eleven couples undertook an hour's ceaseless dancing, but by the end of fifty-six minutes only four were conscious, and the disabled victims were hurriedly sent home in cabs, while one thousand two hundred spectators applauded the winners, who are said to have waltzed, during their circlings round the hall, a distance of more than four miles. 'These are amusements of the vulgar, but a Bostonian friend of the Roosevelts, one of the best-known sports-

women in the United States, and a very nice girl, lately overtasked her strength in attempting the feat of walking by road one hundred and eight miles in fifty five hours. She started gallantly, a company of several hundred ladies marching also for the first fourteen miles; but after that their enthusiasm failed, and she was left trudging all alone, except for the presence of a motor car containing anxious elderly friends and the necessary refreshments. At. the end of sixty-six miles, done in twenty hours and fifteen minutes, the collapse came, and the great walk ended in some remarkably well-earned hysterics. Hysteria ends the proceedings of American champions quite often, though it was toothache only which prostrated the four young ladies of Utica who entered on the

first competition in gum-chewing. After four hours of chewing at the specified rate, at least once every two seconds, the first faint-hearted 'or weak-jawed competitor would try no more; eight hours disposed of the next; and at the end of fourteen hours the appalling toothache of the third could no longer be beguiled, even though "inspiring airs were played on the piano,” and Number

Four, as grimly indefatigable as Mr Fletcher, was declared the "Champion Gum-Chewer of the World.”