FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 839, 6 December 1929, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By “THE LOOK-OUT MAN.” DANGER

“Motorists will not have to pay the traffic department a fee for parkins their cars in the streets.”

Since parkins in the street is free How sweet the motor-driver's fate is. He comes and goes, and pays no fee. His privilege, is granted gratis. Oh, what a simply gorgeous wicket. To park your cars without a ticket!

Yet if within the kerbside line He chooses over-long to tarry. He may be mulcted in a fine. And fines are irksome things. Why Marry! When fines you have to beg or borrow, Then parTctnff is the sweetest sorrow. ANOTHER NORTHCLIFFE

One of the smaller newspapers of the South Island is figuring in a court case. Some of the country papers in the South are historic sheets of quaint interest to printers, and are produced often under such technical difficulties that the wonder is that they come out at all. Yet some of the “busters’’ in little, remote mining centres have been more lucrative gold mines than the claims worked by the subscribers. This may or may not apply to the paper concerned in the current litigation. It makes present scribe feel chirpy, however, to note that the would-be purchaser in the case is a Mr. Twaddle. MENACE The Health Department is rightly concerned over the habit some picnickers have of leaving paper and rubbish in sylvan beauty spots as a slight token of their regard for the owners of the property, or as a symp. tom of their appreciation' of the beauties of the scene. Much of the Health Department’s anguish appears to be based on the expectation that some terrible epidemic may thus be started; but it would seem to the lay observer that the practice might more seriously be objected to on purely aesthetic grounds. It is rather disconcerting to find a charming place where no one can possibly have camped before, and then stumble over a pineapple tin or empty flagon when putting up the communal tent. Yet pineapple tins and empty bottles are on the whole sanitary objects. They are at least empty and no more formidable than the infectious diseases block lately sanctioned in the midst of a populous city by the alert guardians of the public health. RELICS When Sir Charles Fergusson gets back to London he may be able to pick his way down the Strand clad in all the panoply of a well-equipped rangatira. The latest addition to his already extensive collection of native relics and souvenirs is a Maori digging stick, or “ko,” given him in place of the time-honoured silver trowel at the laying of the foundation stone of the Massey College “at Palmerston North. Thus the shades or the departed husbandmen who long ago laboriously tilled the lnimara plots of Tiratea may be propitiated. At any rate, there is a sharp contrast between the ko given to the GovernorGeneral and the methods of agriculture which the college, fostering all that is modern and up-to-date in rural science, will instil Into the rising generation. It will be tractors, not digging sticks, that they learn to handle at the Massey College. Back in Ayrshire, however, Sir Charles may one day feel impelled to put one of his souvenirs to practical use. A little Industrious prodding in the kitchen garden, and he will be able to point proudly to a well-grown lettuce or cucumber. In fact, a new firm of nurserymen might conceivably arise—Sir Charles Fergusson and ko. * * * VARIANT There is commendable originality in the idea of varying the eternal silver trowel ceremony. It has yet to be shown that silver trowels ever did any good to anyone. They just repose in their plush-lined cases along with all the other evidence of a Prominent Person’s past misdeeds. Sir George Fowlds, for instance, is the blameless custodian of a silver trowel given him on the initiation of the Wanganui Technical College, which building has since developed each severe structural faults that it has lately had to be vacated and remodelled. In the circumstances Sir George might reasonably remove the offending relic from his collection. It Is the same with gold keys. Gold keys are given to important people who open the imposing doors of large public buildings. Unhappily the history of these ceremonies is blotted by numerous occasions when the gold keys refused to perform their allotted task. Had a plain iron talisman not been forthcoming, the building would be unopened yet, and there would be cobwebs across the portals. Even in older centres of culture they are i not immune from disaster. When the immense Ford works at Dagenham. near London, were begun a few months ago, Mr. Edsel Ford was presented with a silver spade. He dutifully set out to turn the first sod, and the spade bent like paper. Fortunately Mr. Ford bad a sense of humour, and did not take it as a I personal reflection.