The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 14, Issue 2 (May 1, 1939)
Prophet and Loss
Prophet and Loss.
As his children multiply, his faith in himself is sorely tried and he is even tempted by an advertisement which demands, “How will you answer your children?” to buy a volume of five thousand answers to a similar number of frightful questions likely to be fired at suffering parents by heartless infants. But he knows that the answers to the brainteasers promulgated by his little hot-spots could not be found even in the Talmud; and, anyway, he isn't going to have his style cramped by mere authenticity.
He is already shocked to his artistic giblets by the drab unimaginativeness of the facts fed to his children by the Educational Authorities with the deliberate intention of discrediting his own authority; so much so that he is driven to reply to questions with, “Look it up in the book! How do you expect to learn if you rely on me to tell you everything?”
He can tell you that the Colossus of Roads is a bulldozer, that a bigamist is a heavyweight lifter, that the sign of the Zodiac is three gold balls above a doorway, that the Incas came from the Black Sea, and that an igloo is what an eskimo beats his wife with.