RAILWAY SALE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 110, 1 August 1941, Page 51

RAILWAY SALE

To Young Listeners, NE of the most exciting happenings this week was the Railway Sale. This doesn’t mean a sale of engines and carriages and trucks and rail-cars as it may sound. It means a sale of all the things that you and all of us leave by mistake in trains and at stations. After every journey, the Railway people collect the left behind atticles, and if no one claims them within a year, they are sold at the Railway Sale. Unless you have been to one of their sales, you couldn’t believe what we do leave in trains and at stations. The auctioneer must feel very tired when he looks at the pile reaching from the floor to the ceiling of the railway hall thinking that he has to sell them one by one and be funny about them as well. Books, bicycles, wardrobes, boots and suitcases by the hundred. Coats, cameras, hats, furs, sewing machines, and baskets. Buckets, spades, scatves, shoes, teddy bears, and dolls, Golf clubs, tennis racquets, polo sticks, and footballs. Parcels of every description. Small ones, square ones, bulky ones, and thin ones, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of umbrellas tied up in bundles. "Everything," the auctioneer says "is dirt cheap." Buy A Bundle [ NSTEAD of going to a shop to buy one umbrella for several shillings, you go to the Railway Sale and buy a bundle of six for several shillings. So that afterwards if you lose an umbrella, instead of saying "How awful," you just say "Pouf, it doesn’t matter, I’ve got five more at home." And when you lend an umbrella to a friend, you can say magnificently: "Don’t bother returning it, I have lots and lots of umbrellas." A Lucky Parcel MES. JONES once bought one of the bulky parcels at the Railway Sale, and it changed her whole life. She had a very delicate husband and hardly any money, and a little girl called Mary, who couldn’t get on well with her lessons at school because her clothes were so old and ugly. She and Mr. Jones were very anxious to get a caretaker’s job-but they never could because their clothes were so awful, too. One day, Mrs. Jones went to the Railway Sale, and spent a very precious half-crown on a bulky parcel, because she thought she could see a bit of a man’s overcoat bulging out at the corner. She was right,

and when she took it home and Mr, Jones tried it on, he found a five pound note in the pocket! So they bought a good shirt and tie for Mr. Jones, and some shoes. And a neat dress and shoes for Mrs. Jones, and they applied for a caretaker’s job, and got it. Then they had a comfortable place to live in and good wages, and as Mary could have nice. clothes, she did her lessons neatly and well and was made a monitor. So they all lived happily ever after, all because Mrs. Jones happened to go to the Reilway Sale.

THE CONSCIENCE OF A HEN HE Pig found the Hen hatching her eggs. "Pouf!" cried the Pig, "why sit there?" "Crr," replied the fowl. A reply but no answer. "Ough! Fuff!" said the Pig. "How foolish!" "Crr," came again. An obstinate, silly sound. "Get up! Get up!" said the Pig. "Come and look for food." Yes, she remembered now. She knew she wanted something in a dull, dazed way. "Come!" snuffled the Pig. " Come!" They were a long time looking for that food. When the Pig rooted, the Hen goggled, forgetting what -she came about. When the Hen scratched, the Pig peered, wondering why she kicked so much,

Sometimes the Pig ran. That was when he had a bright idea. But the Fowl’s ideas never got bright. They seemed to addle slowly as she ran, They were a long time away. When the Hen staggered back to the nest and sank on to the eggs they were cold. She was horrified, confused. She began to feel properly terrified, right into her broody conscience. She nestled down deeper into the nest, throwing her head backward and turning up her eyes, in an effort to get life back into the eggs. She became absolutely terrified. Her Conscience was really not as big as a thimble, but it burnt like a house on fire! She could endure it no longer... Shrieking, she fled... In an hour she was Nothing again. She had scratched away her sorrows. Something dreadful had happened-she hardly knew what, as she sobbed down a few worms, Just then another hen came highstepping about, followed by a lot of little fluffy yellow chicks, like bits of muff running on yellow hairpins. In her furious, reckless scratchings she sometimes kicked them away for yards (chickens’ yards), but they jumped up, regardless, and rushed to the scratch again, as she called to them in a yolky tone, suited to their understandings. The Broody Hen forgot her worms. and regarded them. Chicks! Whichever way she looked at them they were the same! Real chicks! She staggered up and began to superintend. She followed them, behaving as the Mother Hen behaved. When the Mother Hen pranced forward, she did the same. When she sat down, she also sat down, and cooed to herself as there was nothing else to coo to. But the Chickens ran to the Broody Hen, because she was nearest. It was feathers and shelter they wanted. They had not too much sense. After all, they, too, had come out of eggs. It’s bad for the head to come out of an egg. And the Broody Hen was silent. She pushed up her lower eyelids and closed her eyes. And when the chicks beneath her stirred, she purred. For now her conscience felt like a tea cosy.