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Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 188, 28 December 1912, Page 4

it asks an acceptance cf the theory that our pleasures, like our virtues and our wives, are a pure matter of personal selection. We have been holiday making in Taranaki for the last few days in most sober earnest. Being typically an English community, we are supposed to take our pleasures sadly, and to "go out and kill something" as the most appropriate method of passing the time, but we are afraid that this suggestion of solemnity and of the vicarious philosophy of indiscriminate slaughter is sadly discounted by the modern Plymouth brethren of the town and their visitors. The trout and the Rchnapper have possibly suffered, and there is the melancholy recollection of money lost at the races to be borne in silent suffering, but for the most part our good folks have taken their holidays much more healthily and profitably. The season is, of course, the premier holiday of the year, and we have been blessed upon this occasion with weather that even the most captious critic must forbear to cavil at. AVe have, in fact, been permitted to appreciate literally The long, blue, solemn hours, serenely , flowing , , From which our lives gain steady help and good: The fitful sunshine moments, coming, going; As if Earth turned from work to play, in fitful mood.

Our holiday spirit makes for wisdom in a nation, because the people who cannot play at the appointed season are like the "liftle weazened sisters, grown mothers," whose only pleasure in life is the toil of nursing the last little -brother in anticipation of the arrival of the next. It is holiday-time that ought to impress upon lis most forcibly the realisation that absolute poverty is, practically speaking, an unknown' quantity in our midst. Anybody who has visited our beaches and our reserves and our other scenic splendours during the last 'few days must have realised that our selfappropriated title of "God's Own Country" is, after all, fairly and honestly earned, and that even the Israelites, casting longing eyes upon the land flowing with milk and honey, from which they were forbidden, would not have abased themselves in sorrow and mortification had they been banished to New Zealand. In our .own little quiet corner of the earth, which still remains the hub of the universe, so far as our purposes are concerned—and at the moment we naturally count among ourselves for more than anybody else—we have had a placid but prolific holiday. The town has probably never been fuller of visitors and never been more appreciatively recognised by those casual birds of passage that wing an idle flight from season to season where fancy prompts them. Of course, as just and loyal citizens we have to get down to commercialism, because, as Max Beerbohm has said, "It's no use being sentimental unless you have at least fourpence in your pocket." All our visitors have left "at least fourpence" somewhere in the town, but it is gratifying to know that they have taken away with them memories and recollections of the beauties of the district that will live with them for many years. Much of this happy exploitation of the district is due to the efforts of the Expansion and Tourist League, and we hope that the result of their first and hospitable invitation to the world to come and play in our back yard will stimulate the League to still further energetic action. We can have a real good time among ourselves at holiday time, but we are quite unselfish enough to wish to share it with those who are unfortunate enough not to be able to live with us permanently.