GAS METER THIEF.

Hokitika Guardian, 27 September 1928, Page 7

GAS METER THIEF.

LONDON, Aug. 9. A curiosity, which, I suppose, will never ,'be satisfied, Inis been aroused in me by a ease in Willesden Police Court. The owner of an unlicensed dog explained that he kept it because iiis gas-meter bad twice been taken away. What increasing responsibilities the march of science imposes on us! Few of us ‘really welcome the gas company’s meter as a valuable or decorative addition to our domestic; furniture. But at least, we might hope that its demands would be satisfied when we have paid for our therms and that we should not also be burdened with its protection against thieves. It is like having to provide a bodyguard for the income-tax collector. What sort of man is it who commits this unusual crime? I have myself, I, fear, sometimes been guilty of coveting mv neighbour’s goods—his purse, bis jewellery, his motor-car —-but never his gas-meter. Clearly, however, there is at least one man to whom these - grim utilitarian instruments present an irresistible temptation. They are inconvenient tilings to carry home in any quantity, and I should not think they are easily converted into cash. So I think this unknown thief must take them to keep. Ji picture his home, with rows of meters, ruddy, massive and severe, ticking away on every shelf. Is he an artist, some genius of the Cubist school, who finds an unsuspected beauty in their uncompromising lines? Or is it simply the collector’s passion ? . MESSAGES BY CLICKS. Perhaps, but I do not think so. 1 incline to think that we have here to deal with some simple soul, in whom the religious motive has worked itself out to unexpected ends. Primitive peoples have been known to- say their orayers to the ticking watch found on the corpse of a shipwrecked mariner. The gas-meter has something of the same aspect of aloof, impenetrable divinity. Somewhere in the back streets ot Willesden I believe that a little company of devotees burn their daily incense in fear and hope before the dread scarlet forms of gas-meters, and interpret the answering clicks as presage of joy or of? disaster.