THAT TRANSFERRING AGENT OR THE EXPLOSION OF A MYTH.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 43327, 19 May 1908, Page 2

THAT TRANSFERRING AGENT OR THE EXPLOSION OF A MYTH.

11l After all there is something mythical, something savouring of Aesop’s fables about That Transferring Agent. We learned it from the special reporter, who in an Auckland interview with the gentleman learned that he had been confiding his observations and general impressions concerning Te Arqha to a certain bird of the loquacious kind. There had been a dialogue, and though the special reporter did not overhear it, That Transferring Agent recounted enough of it to make an excellent story. “ I never saw such a thing,", confided “ That Transferring Agent ” to his feathered friend, “ here fs a town of immense potentialities, and opportunities, and responsibilities, fast asleep, in one solid and deepbreathing slumber.” “ Quite so,” agreed the talkative bird, “ but how would you propose to awaken her ? I assure you it really can’t be done, her publicspirited ones have tried, but in vain, she slumbers on, as you see.” “ But she must be awakened,” answered That Transferring Agent resolutely, “ just consider her opportunities, the pregnant nature of the times, her facilities for increasing her importance as a centre. If, she doesn’t wake up, these things will slip from her, she will settle into permanent and irreversible. torpor and slumpdom simply by permitting her potentialities to be negatived, and her importance to be diminished by the sheer want of sufficient foresight to seize the psychological moment and do the thing that is lying close to hand and crying out to be donfe.” “ For instance said the Feathered One suggestively. “ Well, the river, why can’t she develop that means of transfer as it ought to be developed ? Why, with her position and her facilities she ought to be a town second to no town in the Waikato. Comparisons are odious,’’ went on That Transferring Agent,” but you know as well as I, that it is not a day’s journey from here to where one can see a town which I won’t name, growing as under a fairy wand. Look at this district, look at the land, why should not we be growing the wheat supply for Auckland, why should not we send it thither by the river ? Te Aroha must be the base of distribution, the river jk>rt. We want wharves my friend, and sheds, and transfer facilities on a decent scale-

“ We do," agreed the Feathered One, “ allow me to biggest though, by way of achieving these necessaries, that we should waken up the town, how would you propose to do it ?”

“ And potatoes,” went on That Transferring Agent somewhat irrevantly, they’re another thing Auckland needs badly, very badly. I do assure you I had’nt tasted a decent potato for three years until I came to Te Aroha, since then I’ve eaten enongh to alter my nationality, I almost hear myself talking with a brogue. Why not send potatoes down the river too ? We propose to turn Th* Te aroha News upside down he proceeded, reverting 1 to the Feathered One’s question, and if that won’t awake the sleepers, why then the only experiment left to try is to turn the mountain upside down in some mighty upheaval that wont leave a solitary mouse asleep in a solitary hole in the towni Personally we begin to suspect that the sleeping Beauty is waking up, and we intend to come along and assist in the process of resuscitation as often as the case demands.”

“ Hear ! hear !” rejoined the Feathered One encouragingly, “ I believe she will wake up, and may I be there to see.” “ We mean to be there to see that she does,” laughed That Transferring Agent. And the special reporter tells us that he does mean every word he says. “ For,” says the special reporter, “it is gold he’s after, the gold of great, agricultural and municipal prosperity.”