Grandma Clicks Her Needles

NZ Truth, Issue 1191, 27 September 1928, Page 7

Grandma Clicks Her Needles

WATTLING her loose teeth and peering short-sightedly over her • knitting needles, Grandma "Dominion," through her human eartrumpet, Charles Westwobd Earle, had much to say. for herself when she gathered her children round her last Saturday. Grannie — dear, harmless old soul — exerciseld her privilege of senility by saying lots of things which .didn't really amount to much m point of importance, and of which she thought no one would be sufficiently lacking m respect as to doubt her word. . Buttoning her shawl tightly round her feeble limbs, her ear-trumpet tremulously acting the part of • an impotent loud-speaker, she told her handful of readers on Monday morning all. about herself, and, between whiles, tantalized their ears with a few shameless parodies on the last line of Little Jack Horner'snursery rhyirie. ' Her ear-trumpet-cum-loud-speaker bore up. well for a while,' but when some of her heavier chatter, particularly that m relation to circulation, an 4 also, what they were going to do with the remaining newspapers of the country, crashed, through the timbers, one perceived a decided crack m the situation. . . ' ' She said, between stitches m her knitting (ana other stitches' in the wind of her contemporaries) that "year after year the circulation has piled up." Fancy that! . " , ;■.-'•'. "■'.'• "I remember the happy; days when we reached the 15,000 mark, the 20,000 mark, the 25,000 mark and the 30,000 mark. -We all; felt that at last we had got to the forefront of. the newspaper Press of New Zealand." ". (Applause) . ... "I' am' confident' that 'Tlie Dominion 1 is going io be the outstandingly dominant , paper m; New Zealand • • ■" A. lot of similar chit-chat passed between -her feeble old teeth, and, although, she littered her sheets with a lot of .odd scraps about her piled-up circulation, she seemed 1 blind to the quaint way m which she piled up a tottering mountain of self-ponceit. ....-'■' Come, come, grannie! That .won't do at all. Even the most decrepit of daily journals knows something about the elusive knack of sucking eggs — not to mention its awareness of public demand for audited circulation certificates. - , .'•."" ..Surely, you who love yourself so well, should realize that the public : has been misled so often m your prosaic .columns,'that it likes to taste the pudding-— that seeing the ingredients is- not enough If your circulation is so tremendous, you have nothing to fear m publishing your circulation ' certif joatea., It's up to, you, Granniel ;