WHEN FATHER WAS A BOY

New Zealand Tablet, 2 October 1913, Page 62

WHEN FATHER WAS A BOY

If father is sixty years old, ask him to recall for you what he knew as a boy of ten. Let him impersonate Clio, not holding a roll of papyrus, but a roll of moving picture films showing what he has learned in the last fifty years. Did he tell you how he used the tinder box and whale oil instead of electric light when he road that old geography ur> in the attic, on the maps of which was left blank a great space extending westward between the Missouri River and the Sierras (says the New York Sun). Ask him what he knew about Africa, where last winter he ate Chicago canned turkey a thousand miles up the Nile. ... x He may tell you that France was an empire fifty years ago, Germany a collection of kingdoms and duchies, Japan just admitting foreigners. And New Zealand, what about it in his old, dusty geography, smirched with ink that was blotted with sand? Did Clio know that while she was to push the hands once around the clock,- counting minutes as years, New Zealand, a couple of lonely islands where man grubbed out a living, was to set the pace in labor pensions; woman suffrage, and insurance of the aged ? And China and Argentina, look at them, too. . . Ask father if he knew about turbine engines and engines with internal combustion, such as he has on the touring car. Ask Clio if she doesn't think that the long-distance telephone and the wireless make the Pyramids look small when it comes to seven wonders.