The Wooden Horse

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 489, 19 October 1928, Page 14

The Wooden Horse

An Occasional Column And with great lies about his wooden horse Set the crew laughing , and forgot his course. — J. E. Uccktr* THIS Index business has got to 3 top. Admitted. Granted, in fact, like pardon begged by the polite of the yet politer. It has got to, it will got to. It is arranged, that. Next time we shall be a veritable St. Simeon in personal and sole proprietorship and occupation of this column. (We shall sit on the top of this column Complacent, oracular, solumn. And 'throw off alone Thoughts entirely our own In length, breadth, and thickness, and volumn.) Kissing, promiscuous, Clara’s aversion from, strikingly exemplified. •‘Clara Butt, her Life-Story.” Winifred Ponder, pp. 102-3.

At the station, when the time came for parting, there were the usual rather boisterous farewells, and all the men “kissed Melba good-bye,” and wanted to do the same to Clara. But promiscuous kissing was never in Clara’s line, and she would have none of it. However, M. Plancon would take no refusal, and he seized hold of the reluctant contralto and gave her a hearty embrace. In return, Clara, her spirit aroused at once, first slapped his face, and then burst into tears. There was a rather awkward little scene, in which Melba told Clara she was “a silly young ass” to make such a fuss about.nothing, and everybody seemed to the emotional girl to be rather unkind and unsympathetic. Claret, Isaac Newton’s recipe for. •‘Sir Isaac Newton.” V. E. Pullin. p. 23. To turne waters into wine. 1. Into Claret. Take as much bock wood as you can hold in yor. mouth wth. out discovery tye it up in a cloth, and put it in yor. mouthy then sup up some, wather and champ ye. bockwood 3 or 4 times and doe it out into a glass. Dictionary, composition of, .rational spirit not required for. Essay on. William Cowper in ‘‘Literary Pieces,” Sir James George Frazer, O.M. pp. 136-7. If Mr Newton did much to unhinge his friend’s mind, he at least ipade the attempt, after his departure from Olney, to repair the mischief. With this humane intention he invited Cowper to consider the parallel case of the Rev. Simon Browne, a respectable dissenting clergyman, who, having suffered domestic bereavement or knocked a highwayman on the head (for accounts differ as to the source of his mental affliction) sank into a deep dejection, ending in a settled persuasion that “he had fallen under the sensible displeasure of God, who had caused his rational soul gradually to perish, and left him only an animal life, in common with brutes; so that, though he retained the faculty of speaking in a manner that appeared rational to others, he had all the while no more notion of what he said than a parrot—being utterly divested of consciousness.” In this melancholy situation Browne proposed to apply for the restitution of his lost soul, singularly enough, to Queen Caroline; but the application being nipped in the bud by his friends, he devoted his shattered energies to the composition of a dictionary, a work for which, as he observed with some appearance of justice, the possession of a rational soul is wholly unnecessary. Later in life, sinking still lower in the scale of being, he turned his attention to polemical divinity . . . But the spectacle of the once rational mind reduced to such deplorable extremities brought no comfort to poor Cowper. Glory, Hand of, method of preparing and employment. “Highways and Byways in Yorkshire.” Arthur H. Norway. Quoted on p. 182. The Hand of Glory is the hand of a man who has been hung, and is prepared in the following manner. Wrap the hand in a piece of winding sheet, drawing it tight to squeeze out the little blood that may remain. Then place it in an earthenware vessel with salt, saltpetre, and long pepper, all carefully and thoroughly powdered. Let it remain a fortnight in this pickle, then expose it to the sun in the dog-days until it is completely parched, or if the sun be not powerful enough, dry it in an oven heated with vervain and fern. Next make a candle with the fat of a hung man, virgin wax, and Lapland sesame. The Hand of Glory is used to hold this candle wherever it is lighted. Wherever one goes with this contrivance, those it approaches are rendered incapable of motion as though

they were dead. Doom, impending, political, calm insensitiveness of politicians to, and superstition, Japanese, individual illustration of: suggestive parallel between these. “Afoot in England.” W. H. Hudson. Wayfarers’ Library edn., p. 249. It is said that one of the notions the Japanese have about the fox—a semi-sacred animal with them—is that, if you chance to see one crossing your path in the morning, all that comes before your vision on that day will be illusion. As an illustration of this belief it is related that a Japanese who witnessed the eruption of Krakatoa, when the heavens were covered with blackness and kindled with intermitting flashes and the earth was shaken by the detonations, and when all others, thinking the end of the world had come, were swooning with extreme fear, viewed it without a tremor as a very sublime but illusory spectacle. For on that very morning he had seen a fox cross his path. Quern, terminus ad. ignorance of, unqualified by complete equipment in moral theology. “The Works of Thomas Gray,” edited by Edmund Gosse. Vol. iii., Letters, p. 18S. Frog Walker is dead; his last words were (as the nurses sat by him and said, “Ah! poor gentleman, he is going!”); “Going, going! Where am I going? I know no more than the man in the moon.” The expiring Frog—who should not rashly be identified with the subject of Mrs Leo Hunter’s justly famous Ode —was Doctor Richard Walker, it is desirable to explain, Fellow and ViceMaster of Trinity College, Cambridge, and from 1744 to his death in 1764 Professor of Moral Theology. He founded the Botanic Gardens at Cambridge and got into Pope’s “Dunciad” by dancing attendance on the great Richard Bentley. “His hat, which never vail’d to human pride, Walker with rev’rence took and laid aside.” And why Frog? Only because he hari once been a curate in the fen-country Joke (Cantab.). J. H. E. S.