THE WEEK, THE WORLD, AND WELLINGTON.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9127, 29 June 1908, Page 6

THE WEEK, THE WORLD, AND WELLINGTON.

(By Frank Morton.)

Thb Golden Legend.—Temperament in Sopranos.—Original Sin.—Flies, and Fleas.—Mt Shocking DiscovertPliny and Benjamin Franklin.—A Dream of tiie Fly Treat ment.

"The Golden Legend," although in this verse form somewhat impoverished by Longfellow's consistent lack of compelling inspiration and general poverty of poetic attainment, is still, thanks to the Deauty of the ancient idea and the inveterate fine charm of Sir Arthur Sullivan's captivating music, quite properly one of the most admired cantatas of the time; and the rendering of the cantata by the Wellington Musical Union on Friday night must stand as the musical event of the last month or two in this locality. (That is a terribly overdone sentence; but you'll see what 1 mean). For this, success credit is chiefly due to Mr Robert Parker, the conductor, and to Mi&s Rosina Buckmann, who sang the part ot Elsie. Mr Parker is well known. He has enthusiasm, knowledge and a generally excellent diECL-etipn. Missßuckmann is also well knjwn; but she has not yet received in her own country the general and cordial recognition that her exceptional rents warrant. Her voice is strong, sweet, and of admirable quality; her enunciation is almost impec- ' cable; and he has that transcendent gift of temperament, which is probably rarer among sopranos than among cows or cabbages —the gift without which, mesdames, though you sing with the tongues of divas and of seraphs, you are but as a sounding failure or an animated corset. There is in Miss Buckmann's singing dramatic power, prevadirig sympathy, and the passion which transforms and vitalises the merely literary into the poignant actual. I can only speak of New Zealand sopranos I have heard; but, as regards the true great gift of song. Miss Buckmann towers serenely above them all. A singer without temperament is like a watch without a mainspring—a silly thing at best; or like, shall We say, a pianola, which gives you with perfect accuracy and the nicest precision the mere cold corpse or skeleton of a composer's thought and purpose, tricked-out respectably to please the average unillumined keeper of appearances.

I remember a dear old friend of my boyhood who had an invariable explanation whenever we " youngsters desired the explanation of things detestable in nature. These things were sent into the world, said Mr Keats, because of Original Sin. "Sin came into the world," he would say sagely, "and death by sin, so flies and fleas had to came, an' here they is." The explanation convinced me at the time, although I didn't understand it in the least; but to this day, when a flea or a fly comes near me I arise in sadness and lament the Fall of Adam. Many pests have their subordinate uses, but no man could ever find a word to say in defence of flies and fleas, and it would be sheer malice and flat blasphemy to suggest that creatures so insulting andi without consciences ever crawled o'er Eden. A snake, or a rat, or a ihoth, or a hippopotamus, or a debtcollector, one has some chance with. They can be lured to a quiet spot and privily slain. But what chance have you with a flea. He sees better than"a hawk, he thinks quicker than a bookmaker, he can jump (so to speak, in proportion to hio size) twenty miles in the twentieth of a second. He's the cunningest and most malignant little beast; so that you never understand the real enormity of him till you see him under a microscope. However, you all know him, so we'll no farther seek to draw his frailties from their dread abode. The thing I have to point out with shudders is that both the. fly and the flea are apparently immortal. As to the fly their case seeir;s quite plain. Pliny put me on the track. "Muscis humore exanimatis, si cinere condantur, redit vita." "Flies drowned in water, if they are covered with ashes, will raturn to life." Now, there's a horrible thing to hear! I had always had an idea that if a fly was once caught in a shower I'd done with him. There is no comfort to be gleaned from authorities.' So far as I can discover, they all stand by Pliny. There is Benjamin Franklin, that most admired and respectable philosopher. He makes it even worse. According to him, flies will come bark to life after they're drowned in anything. One could understand their returning after being drowned in water, were it only to overcome the unpleasantness of the sensation; but to return after being drowned in wine! Anyhow, hear Dr. Franklin:— "I have seen an instance cf common fliea preserved in a manner somewhat similar. They had been drowned in Madeira wine, apparently about the time when it was bottled in Virginia to be sent hither (to London). At the opening of one of the bottles, at the house of a friend where I then was, three drowned flies fell into the first glass that was filled. Having heard it remarked that drowned flies were capable of being revived by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment upon these; they were, theref jre, exposed to the sun upon a sieve, which had been employed to strain them out of the wine. In less than three hours, two of them began by degrees to recover life. They commenced by some convulsive movements of the thighs, and at length they raised themselves upon their legs, wiped their eyes with their lore-feet, beat and brushed their winga with their hindfeet, and soon after began to fly, finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how they came thither." The surprise of the flies may be left tu your sympathetic imagination. "Tne third continued lifeless till sunset, when losing all hope of him, he was thrown away." I suppose tnat the open-air revivified him, and that he straightway sought out some honest jounnlwt, and bit him viciujsly on the left eyelid. So here w have tlw fact, the truly awful f ct, expose;! and made manifest: u-j'b only can you not drown flies to diitth i'v water, but you canmt even pickle them tu death in alcohol. Dr. Franklin's comments on this amazing thing are mou charming and characteristic:—"l wmil it vvtre possible, frooi this instance, to invent a method of emOahning drowned persons, in

such a manner that they may be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent de- ] aire to see and observe the state of , America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time, to he then recalled to life by the solar life of my dear native country. But since in all probability we live in an age too early and too near the infancy of science, to hope to yee such an art brought in our time to its perfection, I must for the present content mysolf with the treat, which you are so kind as to promise me, of the resurrection of a fowl or a turkey-cock." Well, on this I put the matter to a test. I got a fly, and with many precautions I immersed him in my inkpot. He came up three times, and each time I gently pushed him back with the point of my penholder. When he came up no more, 1 'let him alone. Three hours later I gingerly drew him forMi and put him on a bit of blotting paper in the sun (there happened to be some sun that day) on my window-sill. Half-ari-hour later he moved. He sniffed and fidgeted with all the apparent motions of disgust. Then he went through all the antics Dr. Franklin so naively describes, and finally fluttered away into the sunset none the worst. It is stated that fleas also may be revived in th:s way ; but no man would ever be fool enough to revive a flea, even if any man should ever contrive to catch one. When a woman ".atches one, she can never be persuaded to give it away. Her blood'a up.