NIBBLES FROM RUDYARD KIPLING.

Digger (Invercargill RSA), Issue 38, 3 December 1920, Page 5

NIBBLES FROM RUDYARD KIPLING.

(From "Letters of Travel," by Rudyard Kipling).

"You know the answer to the riddle oi' the Sphinx? "No," I murmured. "Wha is it?" "All sensible men are of the sam. religion, but no sensible man everteiis. Once upon a time there was a murdere who got off with a life-sentence. Whe impressed him most, when he had timo t think, was the frank boredom of all wli took part in the ritual. "It was just like going to a doctor c: a dentist," he explained. "You come 1 'em very full of your affairs, and the you discover that it's only part of thei daily work to them. I expect," he addec "I should have found it the same if — erI'd gone on to the finish." He would have. Break into any nei hell or heaven, and you will be met ai its well-worn threshold by the bored ei pert-s in attendance. "A man's instinct is to teach a boy t- ■ think for himself. If a woman can" make a boy think as she thinks, she sit down and cries. A man hasn't any standards. He makea 'em. A woman' the most standardized being in the world. She has to he. Now d'you see?" "Not yet." "Well, our trouble in America is tha: we're being school-marmed to death." It is not easy to escape from a big city . . . . We lingered in New York till th city felt so homelike that it seemed wron, to leave it. And, further, the more om studied it, the more grotesquely bad i grew— bad in its paving, bad in its streets bad in its street-police, and but for th kindness of the tides would be wor&e* tha: bad in its sanitary arrangements. No on. as yet has approached the maHagement c New York in a proper spirit; that is t. say, regarding it as the shiftless outcom of squalid barbarism and reckless extrava gance.