MY GRANDFATHER’S CLOCK.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2167, 27 February 1880, Page 3

MY GRANDFATHER’S CLOCK.

If there is one man I should like to interview' before joining the great majority, it is the author of “My grandfather’s clock.” I look upon that man as my natural-born enemy. He haunts me in my sleep, annoys mo when awake, and generally renders my life a misery. Of course, every man’s grandfather had a perfect right to own a clock. This is a free country, and though w'e are overtaxed and underpaid, that’s no reason why our grandfathers should not run a clock. But why on earth, because an old fellow’s grandfather had a clock that “stopped, never to go any more ” he should be reminded about fifty times a clay of the fact in a song, I am at a loss to understand. It seems to me that it is rather hard on fathers, and uncles, and aunts. Why shouldn’t songs be composed about their clocks when they stop, or when they go tick-tock, just as much as a grandfather’s box of w'eights and wheels ? Besides it’s an encouragement to clocks to stop, in order to have songs written about them. To ray mind, it’s the first step towards setting blood relations against blood relations. I have a clock for instance that never so much as said “ Tick, lock, tick, tock,” but the divil a node ” has any poet scribled about it. My object in wishing to interview' the author of “ My grandfather’s clock ” is just to place these views before him. It wouldn’t surprise me, after the success of this clock business, to bear that “My grandfather’s warming pan ” was the next sensation in the comic song line. Now, there is a histoiy about an antiquated warming-pan which deserves to be immortalised in verse, but I’ll bo hanged if I can see any poetry in an old relation’s clock, which, on the slightest provocation, stopped never to go any more. —John Pcerybingle, in the “ Weekly Times.”