FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1022, 12 July 1930, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

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THINK OF A NUMBER

“She seems to have a mania for telephoning,” said a Dunedin magistrate, when a young woman was charged with wilfully giving false alarms of fire by communicating with the brigade from public penny-in-the-slot booths. You may have your talking picture plays With their heroes slim and bland, You may dance till dawn in your cab-. At the call of a lilting band. But give me the thrill of the spinning dial, And the mellow humming tone— Why, I’d run a mile with an eager smile To a Public Telephone. Some girls delight In a moonlight night And a roadster just for two, And some may year n for the virile sight Of a Jack Tar dressed in blue— But give me the choice of numbers ten, A penny to call my own, A lire squad waiting within its den. And a Public Telephone! M.E. : SPOTS AND HOTS A dot in time would have saved a line for a Wellington youth who at- ’ tempted the other day to delude the authorities by re-painting last year’s motor-cycle number-plate. In the succinct words of the Press Association, “he overlooked one small but highly important fact, namely that last year there was only one white dot between the thousands numbers and the hundreds, whereas this year there are two." This is quite an edgarwallacesan story and, in common justice, the lynx-eyed constable or traffic inspector who spotted the absence of the spot or dot should be given a new notebook or something in recognition of his smart work. Then again, a thought should be given to the young man who was lined for the offence. His name suggests that he is a Scotsman and, this being so, the thought that he has lost £1 merely, because he was not sufficiently spotty' will drive him nearly dotty. However, as the Dutch would have it, dot’s dot. HIS REST INO PLACE On a liill-slope swept by tlie winds of Foveaux Strait is the Bluff cemetery, where tomorrow' Sir Joseph Ward will be laid to rest. This, the most southern burial place in the South Island, is on the western side of bush- i clad Bluff Hill, and its plots are warmed by the rays of the setting sun as it dips behind the ranges in tlie direction of historic Riverton and the mountains of the West Coast. Below the cemetery ITnd linked to it by a winding road is the Port of BlufT. where the career of Sir Joseph Ward began. In the other direction is the panorama of the Ocean Beach isthmus, with its rolling sand dunes.’ On the right is the harbour bay; on the left, beating the southern shore of the isthmus are the rollers of the Tasman Sea as they advance through the strait to meet the heavy swell of the South Pacific. In the misty distance are the rugged shores and snow-capped m(retains of Stewart Island. Such is the place where the last of New Zcaian great Liberals will lie. ACROSS THE VOID? Nothing was more certain than that the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would be the signal for widespread activity on the part of spiritualistic mediums, all of them eager to communicate with their departed leader. Already an attempt, has been made and a success announced in New Zealand, and there are certain to be many more. However, in a case such as this, the persons to whom a critical World must turn expectantly are the dead man’s intimates, more particularly his wife. Lady Doyle has allowed it to be announced that she and her husband shared a code word, known to them alone. If a messag* comes across the void accompanied b; that word it must, she says, emanate from the spirit of Sir Arthur. B? one sceptical or otherwise it cannot but be admitted that the situation possesses extraordinary * interest. Spiritualism has lost its most dogged champion, yet it stands to receive from him greater service than ever before —either that or a mute rebuttal of all that he has claimed and fought for. PIPE AND VIOLIN But will Sir Arthur Conan Doyle be remembered only as a great spiritualist? This is hardly likely; on the contrary, it may be said with a good deal of truth that Doyle, the writer of detective stories, w'as much more famous.than Doyle the investigator of psychic phenomena. Thousands upon thousands of people who have never read of his lectures, his spiritualistic museum, and his fairy photographs, know Sherlock Holmes as a household name. They have followed breath lessly the adventures of that father of the modern fictional detective with his pipe, his violin, and his old cloth cap. No brain-child of a novelist is better known than Sherlock Holmes He is the accepted standard of comparison. If we wish to praise a reallife detective we say quite naturally, “He is a regular Sherlock Holmes,” and not one person in a hundred would be ignorant of our allusion and meaning. To so engrave a mythical personality on the mind of the world is a considerable achievement, worthy of greatness, and the names of keeuej r ed Sherlock and his creator will always be linked together.