FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 746, 20 August 1929, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By “THE LOOK-OUT MAN.” TROUBLED SPIRIT Mr. Collingwood Hughes, the exM.P., who criticised the latest batch of immigrants for Australia,, is now suffering from insomnia. His fellow passengers he taunted, A waste of money to assist ’em. And now, by grim reproaches haunted, He finds he’s wrecked his nervous system. Deserted by elusive sleep, He spends his evenings counting sheep. McSHOVEL. * * THIS WAY IE According to strangers, part of the charm of arriving in Auckland is the , difficulty of doing so. A profoundly ignorant Southerner relates that on reaching the distant outpost of Papakura he erroneously considered himself not only home and dried, but also registered and refreshed as" well. Full of contentment, he finally drew up in the main street of Otahuhu. and staggered a native by asking to be directed to the Grand Hotel. (He was a sheepfarmer, and this was in the good old days before super-tax came along). There is the parallel case of a Wellington visitor who carried in his head the strictest instructions to follow the tram-tracks and so reach Queen Street. He followed them all right—through Newmarket, along the Khyber Pass, out on to the New North Road, and finally reached Dominion Road terminus. He was the most disgruntled man this side of Port Nicholson when a resident of that quarter informed him that, like another celebrated character, he had taken the wrong turning. HOTII-BA TEX Evidently the poultry in Europe are educated up to airplanes and Zeppelins, for there is no news of protests from poulterers in that land of air mails and aerial tourists. Latest to 'join the happy band of skyriders is Mr. Hamish Armstrong, a Hawke’s Bay farmer, who has confided to an interviewer that when he gets back his plane will be useful in making calls on friends or locating bushfires. So far as the L.O.M. knows Akitio. whence the exulting tourist hails, there is not much bush left to burn, and not much flat land, either, so making social calls may present, more difficulties than hopping round Europe. Still it is gratifying to learn that the landed proprietors of Hawke’s Bay are not opposing the introduction of the airplane, as it is reported they once opposed the construction of a railway on the grounds that such newfangled contraptions would spoil the hunting and allow the intrusion of mere outsiders into their rustic solitude. * s * 7.V MY G ARD EH The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la. Yes, except on wet Sundays they make one feel rather like that, and coupled with the current fashion shows they give the impression that spring really is lurking just round the corner. There is a popular impression that not every one can have a garden, but if those who subscribe to this belief saw flat-dwellers tenderly nursing their radiant windowboxes, they would alter their opinion. We know an old gentleman who, proud of the flowers in his cheerful apartment, tells all inquirers that they come from his own garden. “The garden’’ occupies two window-sills on a sunny frontage. It is the disastrous truth that to comply with either the city ordinances or the requirements of a salubrious locality he had to get window-boxes that cost £3 10s apiece. But impecunious readers need not be discouraged. A fruit-box does just as well. SHIP AHOY Proposals to improve the stately Waikato as a navigable waterway recall the immense sums spent in the improvement of the Wanganui River, which has been navigated by steamers since IS9O, when the first steamer, the Wairere, was built. In straightening out tortuous rapids great weirs and groynes have been formed, but in the upper reaches the steamers still have to climb the rapids with the aid of a winch and a steel wire. The Waikato is a proposition of a different sort. Its tawny current is usually too sluggish, rather than two swift, and near its mouth the vagrant channels roam away into all sorts of romantic backwaters, the perfect setting for a story of adventure among picturesque banks and islands. The Manuwai, on which the Ministerial party made the trip on Saturday, is a flat-bottomed sternwheeler after the American type, and came originally from the Wanganui. She was built for excursion parties, but nowadays treads the tranquil I river with any cargo that is offering.