A Gift from China

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 892, 7 September 1956, Page 30

A Gift from China

by

SUNDOWNER

AUGUST 10

F the O.E.D. would pass the ] expression-it will in a year or two-I would say that a New Plymouth reader has put me on the spot by presenting me with a young tree that I will have to live 50 vears to see in its full glory; 20 years to sit under; and 10 to see, through a glass darkly, what it will one

day become. But I can take that joke. I accept the gift in

the spirit in which it was made-I think that is the proper atknowledgmentgrinning back if the sender gtinned when he posted it, thinking seriously of my weight and my appetite if his purpose was to call me to plainer thinking; but in any case gratefully. Although trees grow too slowly for most of us, and live too long, only the rocks remind us less frequently of our mortality. I am informed, too, that this particular tree -Metasequoia glyptostroboides — was,

10 years ago, known only as a fossil. In 1948, however, one of those expeditions that orly fanatics join and rich men can pay for found living specimens in a rémote prdvince in China. Aid here already one is growing (I hope) half a chain from my front door. Well, we owe’ a lot to China-tea, silk, chopsticks, washed brains, and the stupendous folly and iniquity of the Great Wall. We owe Chiang and Chou en Lai, crackers, Confucius, dragons and rhododentrons, and mofe births and deaths évery hour than any other country has ever recorded. It stimulates me that now I personally, though six hundred millions stood nearer at hand, have been giveri something else from China that should, and perhaps will, lengthen my life by as long as it takes Mao Tse

Tung to convert a landlord into a nonobstructionist. a ate _

AUGUST 12

FTER trimming 500 hoofs during the last two days, and about the Same number a few days earlier, I hardly know which surprises me most: the efficiency of a sheep’s foot when it is healthy or its weakness when things go wrong. This has been a good year for feet in Canterbury, and only a small percentage of the thousand I have just éxaminied and ttimmed had anything

seriously wrong. But when ° disease was present it had usually

eatetl away dnd deformed the whole hoof, so that the sheep, itistead of walking firmly on two pads, was walking on ohe or hone, walking on its heel with its toe turned up and back, or limping about on a shell full of putrefaction. I accept the pronouncement: of experts

* that these conditions are avoidable, and curable when they have not advanced too far. But what farmer does avoid them if he is a buyer as well as a breeder? What farmer has facilities: for dealing with them as thoroughly as_ etradication demarids? I have never seen a : wild sheep with footrot, or a wild goat or deer, _ though I hesitate to say that it never happens, I ' think it would happen iif wild sheep or deer ; used a muddy track re- / céntly infected by a i badly diseased mob of domestic sheep, and kept | of using it. To be safe goats and ceer would | have to walk of one ' toe, like a horse, and then. they would often fall and break their necks, get bogged, or die lingering deaths with a foot caught in roots or creepers. As long as they walk oh two toes sheep will get inflammations between the toes and bacterial invasions, but it is the cloven hoof that gives them safety on steep faces and eases the hiirdan af climbingo and

descencing. It is not an accident that the Devil always has two toes like a goat, never one like a dotikey.

AUGUST 15

ts a a \W E were watching Elsie where I had just tied her in the garden to keep her under observation after an attack of what is wrongly called milk fever. Somehow or other we started to argue. "I am sick’ 6f your persistent refusal

to be sérious." "Why should I be

serious?" "Because life is serious." "Who said so? Longfellow, of course, but who else?" "All the wise men for two thousand years." : (continued on next page) ~

(continued from previous page) "Well, that is not very many in the history of man. The Queen Elizabeth would hold them all." "You don’t know how many it is. Nobody does. But even if you were right it is too many to scoff at." "When did I do that?" "You are always doing it. You laugh at everything that is sacred." "Would you be more definite. Name something sacred that I scoff at." "Religion," "Religion is a big word. Which one do you mean?" "There is only one." "I think there are hundreds. But if we consider only your religion 1 "There you go at once. Scoffing at Christianity." "I think you had better try again. Or let me finish what I started to say." "I don’t want you to finish. There was mockery in your voice. You were sneering at my faith." "Do you sneer when you name Mohammedans; or Buddhists; or followers of Confucius or Zoroaster?" "Those are dead religions. This is the Christian era." "How many Christians in two thousand years? What pescekitnge of mankind?" I did not wait for the answer. Neither did Elsie, who suddenly staggered, swayed, and fell on her chest with her legs spread on either side. Pa ae Ba

AUGUST 18

IXTY years ago no one swam in Lake Wakatipu. It was so cold that to dive into it was to be seized by cramp and drowned. So everybody ‘believed. Then an intelligent schoolmaster went down to the lake with a thermometer and proved that the average temperature through an average summer was very

little below the temperature of the sea at St. Clair. After that

visitors began to swim, local residents joined them, and cramp and_ sudden death disappeared. Now girls seeking fame as swimmers try the journey from side to side, and one day no doubt will try from end to end. But I find it more difficult than it used to be to surrender. to the thermometer. When it says frost I can still shiver, but I can’t warm up by noticing that the mercury is rising. The hypnotist is losing power, the patient belief." But I can, I find, warm faster than the air if I meet another unbeliever. If my feelings or readings are questioned or denied; if someone says it is cold when I know it is two degrees warmer than it was at the same time yesterday; if I say before I see the figure that there has been a record frast and some nark answers, "Oh, I don’t know: I think it was colder yesterday," and then calmly goes to the thermometer; when anything like that happens heat can rise rapidly to the very crown of my head. } It was not so when the test of a frost was the weight of a draught horse on a rutted road. (To be continued) LL

Hli

METASEQUOIA GLYPTOSTROBOIDES "Something from China that should lengthen my life by as long as it takes Mao Tse Tung to convert a landlord"