NEAR AND FAR

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 118, 11 January 1932, Page 4

NEAR AND FAR

Sign of tlie Times. » In the old days, whert home life was, a cherished thing, many a home had an organ, around which, especially on Sunday evenings, the yourig people used to gather and sing the hymns and sacred tunes dear to the heart of an older generation. Recently an elderly lady, whose fyigers Gould no longer manipulate the keyboard, and who was beset by bad times, thought she would sell the organ which had been handed down to her, and whose mellowness had increased with-age. She found that no one wanted an^organ, and that few homes had fKem, athough many possessed. a radio set. She finally obtained an offer for it — equal to the prices of a second-hand gramophone.

Floating College. The Conway, visited by the Prince. of Wales at Liverpool, is a famous school as well as a 'training college for the merchant serVice. A pictttresque survivor in bladk ahd v/hite of the old three-decker windjammer days, moored well up the Mersey Estuary in midstream, her tall spats OVei*look Liverpool Cathedral and the Wir"ral villages. Boys whose parents have no thought of a Sea career fof them attend the Conway. But sea fever is catching, specially for Ehglish youths, and most of them hear the call of the Red Ensign. Mr. John Masefield, the poet laureate, is only one of many distinguished old Conway cadets. Talks with an old shellback, a petty officer aboard her, inspired most of his "Mainsail Haul," in which Mr. Masefield reveals a prose essay style that many prefer even to his poetry.

Europe's Mystery Man. Until the recent biography appeared Mustaipha Kemal, creator and dictator of modern Turkey, was least known of all post-war autocrats. He is unquestionably the most convincing of them all in appearance. Thin- lipped, firm-jawed, keen-eyed, with the soldier's head, he would, in a Stetson and a cartridge belt, make his fortune at Hollywood as a film gunman. Son of a Salonika Customs officer, he spent a lonely ruminative boyhood scaring crows from crops, but graduated brilliantly at a military College. Worsted by Enver Pasha in his attempt to get Turkey into the war against Germany, Kemal seized his chance when the Greeks invaded Smyrna. He is a profound mathematician, talks like Foch and with the same vivid metaphors, and has really Westernised the immemorial Turk. History embalttis few stranger careers.