A READER’S MEDLEY

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 105, 28 January 1935, Page 7

A READER’S MEDLEY

STREET INCIDENT He is obviously a very tiue old man, I thought, glancing at him as I hurried toward him along the Quay. • There was something of an easy restraint in ids upright figure, something of a tempered and gentle strength about him that his old-fashioned clothes enhanced all the more. The hand that grasped his stick was strong. I noticed, but gnarled strength was not its only cunning. Amid the rush and clangour of the thoroughfare, be held on his way with a dignified self-posses-siou. He gave the impression of having an independence, whether financial or otherwise, that set him on a plane apart. Such were my random speculations as 1 drew level with him.

Whether the small knot of people jostled him, or whether he temporarily lost his footing, 1 could not tell, but I heard a sudden clatter and saw the old man’s stick fall from his grasp and shoot across the flagstones into the roadway. With, I suppose, an instinctive deference to his age, I took two paces to 'pick it up and hand it back to him.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said with cheerful friendliness. His eyes were a bright blue, contrasting with the trim whiteness of his beard. He paused, oblivious of the crowd, and passed a hand appreciatively over the stick, brushing off the slight scratches it may have received. "A verv old blackthorn,” he explained to me. “I brought it from Ireland myself.” I looked then at the stick. It was indeed smooth and reassuringly heavy—a good servant in trouble, a friend to lean upon. It possessed the same quality of unshakeable integrity as its owner. And it seemed to me, as 1 passed on, that it was an unusual and a pleasant thing, amid a world of concrete and steel and mobile metalwork, that the old gentleman still set so high a value on his smoothly-knobbled blackthorn stick —J.M.