"LAMENT OF THE- POOR SAP"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 355, 12 April 1946, Page 13

"LAMENT OF THE- POOR SAP"

ce RE you suffering from headaches : this morning, sir?" The announcer asks as he comes on the air. "How are your kidneys, your liver, your lights? Do you still suffer from ‘getting up nights’? Are there slugs in your garden, grey hairs in your head? Do you occasionally feel you’d be better off dead? Does your wife need new corsets, a perm, or pink pills? Are your children a prey to a multitude of ills? You need pep, you need ping, and we've got. just the thing that will throw off your worries and make the world _ sing.

Don’t wait for your breakfast, but dash off straight away, and purchase a packet of whatever we say. It will cost you a guinea, perhaps-but don’t frown; there are plenty of things priced at just half-a-crown. But that is a trifle; whatever you pay, it’s very important you DO IT TO-DAY." And there is the crux of the matter, my friend. What’s my trouble to you, as long as I spend? Though the medicine chest now holds bottles galore, and the surplus has long since been stacked on the floor; and the number of people entitled to hope that I live on a simplified diet of soap grows daily-but still I maintain, and this is the point about which I complain; that whether I'm ill, well, or already dead, it’s nothing to you. Would you bother your head to shed just one tear if you heard I was ill from taking a bottle of some of your pills? You’d just say, as you count up the profit that’s in it-‘"Poor sap! But, you know, there’s one born every minute!" Well, go on with your blurbing; ask after my health as you skilfully rifle my pockets by stealth. But remember that this is what curls up my hair-the fact. you mean wretch, that you don’t even

care.

M. B.

Hayes.