I LIKE to see servants of the Crown showing proper respect for the dignity of their office, writes a Yorkshire "Post" correspondent, I encountered this respect the other day in a very small post office which is, in addition, mewsagent's shop. At one end of the counter important business in connection with His Majesty's mails and the Inland Revenue is transacted behind a wire grille; at the other end one buys newspapers and tobacco or borrows romantic novels from the lending library.
My business in the shop was concerned with both departments, I wanted six stamps and an evening paper. The postmistress issued the stamps and then there was a pause. "And an evening paper I said at length.
The postmistress stared haughty the Post Office," she said severely. be obtained in the shop."
I moved two yards to the left. The postmistress moved two yards to the right. The mantle of postmistress-ship slipped from her and she became the urbane shopkeeper. "Now,". she said genially as if noticing me for the first time, "What can I get you?"
How Our Grandpas Lived KwockiNG back a couple of snorters of tonic wine with 104-year-old Mr. Horatio Creak, I listened enthralled to his vivid recollections of. the days of our great-grandfathers, writes a British columnist.
"Ay, young folk today have no idea of the way we old uns used to live," he mumbled, shaking his head. "There was no talkies in them days. We had Mary Pickford, but we couldn't hear her. And you couldn't telephone farther than Constantinople."
1 gasped. "Go on," I prompted.
"These here pound notes, too. They called em Bradburys once. We had threepenny-bits of silver, so we did. And travelling! Why, I remember they used to crank up motorcars, but that was before them traffic-lights or Belisha beacons. An as for flying, why, it used to take two hours to get to Paris.
We got our fun, though. There was put-and -take. And instead of this mad Lambeth Walk" and Boomps-a-Daisy—going back to the savages, I call it—we had a dance that was graceful-like to watch. The Charleston they called it, or some such name."
Unfortunately the old man's mind wanders a bit and he imagines things. I left when he began rambling about the B.B.C. at Savoy Hill, halfpenny newspapers and some queer exhibition at Wembley.
Sai Po €! P CEE
THE WEATHER
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.