PERSONALITY OF THE WEEK.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 225, 22 September 1928, Page 8

PERSONALITY OF THE WEEK.

Mr. Justice Hubert Henry Ostler is at heart a man of the great wide spaces, but he fits very snugly where he is placed now. He is equally at home MR. looking from beneath his JUSTICE OSTLER, wig or the back sights of an express rifle, for he has tracked the ponderous elephant, pumped lead into him at short range, and has denuded Africa of many ferocious felidae. His Honor was attracted to big game even when he was a fighting barrister not yet elevated to the Bench. He owns a large tract of land in Africa, but it is not a cutting-up, suburbanbungalow proposition, the likelihood of tigers lapping the morning milk being a handicap. The judge is a Blue Coat boy, but he left Christ's Hospital many years ago. His love for great spaces was learnt on his father's run in the Mackenzie country, but, barring perhaps a moose or two, nothing of a really dangerous nature is to be shot there. He was formerly associate to the Chief Justice and editor of the law reports.

This is the glad season of the year when the tiny blossoms of the strawberries show above the earth and determined pedestrians enrol the tardy elector. THE VOTERS. One gentleman, arriving

chez de M.A.T., admitted that he had covered per boot that day upwards of fourteen miles and had even discovered the boundary between Waitemata and the new division, Auckland Suburbs. The intending elector is confronted with the headline saying that the document is for anyone who is not a sailor, and one supposes that if he dared to infer that he is a sailor when in fact he is an architect he would be liable to the financial impasse threatened on the foot of the document. The arduous pedestrian has no sinecure. To perch the last three typewritten supplementary rolls on the top of a fence in a gale of wind to find out if the elector has been entered up requires a steady hand and determination. The card gives a list of those dread persons before whom one may 6ign the document, and the proposed elector wonders where on earth he can dig a J.P., or a clergyman, or a postmaster from, until he comes to the glad line that gives him permission to sign it in the presence of his wife (if she be over twentyone) or any other elector. Till then he has visions of fines of twenty pounds or gaol without the option. Apropos the female vote which we have revelled in for so long, sensible John Bull is refraining from asking lady electors their ages, being content to know that each is at least twenty-one. Coincident with this electoral activity, the air is clanging with the voices of our coming members. You see candidates being the perfect little gentlemen wherever you go, rushing to aid perambulators in distress, asking anxiously after one's health, and so forth. One awfully nice fellow whom M.A.T. had never seen before rushed up to him, shaking him cordially by the hand: "And how are the children?" he asked, and rushed off to help a lady with a perambulator under the impression that it was a small M.A.T. and vote.

Aucklanders have refrained during tne past short period from calling Wellingtonians' attention to the prevalence of wind in Poneke, and would willingly sell EQUII7OX. them a few blasts from rude Boreas. It has blown with a persistency and industry that makes a fellow wonder when he is going to get a live wire round his neck, or find his cottage and mortgage transplanted to other spheres. Still, it is relatively calmer than a mill pond compared with places one wots of. He who has observed the antics of the Australian "willy-willy," which piles dust-dry vegetation for uncountable miles along the wire fences, who has seen the dust devil, black as night and like a great bottle moving across the plains, longs for the cloistered calm of Wellington. In that vast territory a young wind grows to an old devil as it gets in its second thousand miles, and, curiously, in giant bush will sometimes cut an exact swathe of trees as truly as if plotted by surveyors. Some monarchs of the forest are twisted off like carrots in powerful hands, and others are simply rooted up and thrown like match sticks aside. The prevalence of equinoctial breezes revives imperfectly a poetic effusion in imitation of Rudyard's style:

"Have I wool?" said the Ba-Ba Black Sheen 'ion ask me have I wool? When I send to the shears with three loud cheers As much as three bags full? Have I wool? Have I wool? You'll find it In the soles of the sailors' socks, Retaining their heat in the driving sleet And the gales of the equinox."

CHAOTICS. Ye're richt, ye ken. The solution of 'Davy s word is: Xhcfeleeacc Eeclefechan. Not content with this, he sends: Nhcahcataacharihcantaa. A THOUGHT FOR TO-DAY. Profound ignorance makes a man dogmatic. He that knows nothing thinks he can teach others what he jußt now ha* learned himself. —La Bruyere. .""*'•» v