FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 26, 22 April 1927, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By the LOOK-OUT MAN HORSE FOR PRINCESS BETTY A cablegram received yesterday gives details of birthday gifts which Princess Betty has received from her Royal grandparents. -His Majesty is credited with the present of a “dappled grey rocking horse.” It is believed the Prince of Wales intended to give to his little niece some of the rocking-horses which so frequently get him into print. But apparently the King has forestalled him! INFLUENZA “PRECAUTIONS” As an assurance that “precautions” are in operation to prevent Auckland’s frightful experience of becoming infected by wholesale influenza from a visiting ship being repeated, the public are informed that members of the crew of the steamer Somerset are not being permitted ashore —for a period of 48 hours! Meanwhile, waterside workers have been allowed access to the ship, and they come and go, as well as any other individuals who have business there. It does not seem to strike the health authorities that persons other than members of the crew may contract influenza from an infected ship, and bring it ashore to spread among the community. The lesson of the 1918 epidemic must surely have been expunged from the of the Health Department. SURVIVAL OF THE CAVE In a world of strife and sorrow, with war 3 and rumours of wars, shipwrecks, air crashes, brigandage, piracy, wholesale murder, insolvency and undiminuted cost of living (vide daily Press),' it is refreshing to turn to these reports of domestic amenities which so brighten our hearthstone. There was, for instance, the tender story of the devoted wife (told in the Auckland Police Court), who followed her husband from hotel to hotel until “I went to hit him and he pushed me out and fell and struck my head. on the concrete and I knew no more till I woke up in hospital.” (No t punctuation, please, Mr. Printer, for ’tis recorded as ’twas told.) “And,” said the lady friend (who found the wife lying on the footpath and “thought she was dead”), “as for her husband, he is the nicest man you could wish to come across.” The dear fellow! His wife had misunderstood him. “I was sitting on the steps of the wash-house,” he said, “when the wife came home.” He knew she had arrived, because he “got a crack on the jaw with the broom.” The felicities of married life are expressed in many ways. A smack with a fryingpan or a crack with a broom are but expressive of the varying moods of conjugal affection, and it does us good to turn from a chapter of the world’s ills to note that marital bliss still retains some of the good old practices of the Cave Age. VIRGIL If you have learned a lot and given of your knowledge to the people, you are likely to be remembered with honour a long time after you are dead. Take Virgil, for instance. The Roman poet died 19 years before the birth of Christ, or 1946 years ago, yet the inhabitants of his birthplace, Mantua, unveiled a statue to him only this week, in the presence of a great gathering of scholars, this statue replacing the Roman monument destroyed by Carlo Malatesta 600 years ago. If a prophet has no honour in his own country, a poet has. Virgil’s full name was Publius Vergi-

lius Maro, and he was the son of a small landowner. He learned Greek at Milan and Naples and studied rhetoric and philosophy at Rome. His father’s estate being seized after the battle of Phillipi and given to the friends of the Emperor Octavian, he Visited Octavian and was compensated by an estate at Campania. He wrote the Ten Eclogues or Bucolics, a Treatise on Agriculture, on beekeeping, tillage, the cultivation of the vine, on cattle-breeding; the Hereid, an epic poem in 12 books (which took him 11 years to write and was even then incomplete, and which was a glorification of the House of Augustus, reputed to have been founded by Augustus). Thi3 work became the Roman national epic. Like the works of Homer, those of Virgil became a popular schoolbook and the subject of much grammatical and antiquarian research. For his day and generation, Virgil was a very modern individual. A “ JOKE ” Some people have peculiar ideas of humour. One such advertised in a Wellington paper for six pick and shovel men, and 70 unemployed arrived at the rendezvous, only to find they had been hoaxed. It would be difficult to conceive a sufficiently suitable penalty for perverts who play jokes of this description on unfortunate men out of work —unless it were that they be tailed across the Gobi Desert, with a barrel of beer and a sizzling steak just out of reach. Some of the hoaxed men, however, might devise a punishment even more suitable.