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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 6 (October 1, 1929)

Foreign Travail

Foreign Travail.

When he recovers and delivers his verdict, you feel that your only hope is to be taken to bits and reassembled. He is quite candid; he does not recognise you as a member of the human family—you are simply a bad case; just so many symptoms held in captivity by your page 45 personality; a cornucopia of complaints, a museum of microbes, and a boarding-house for bacilli. Your only hope is to get away from yourself. He realises that there are some things too dreadful to escape,
“To bed with the hens.”

“To bed with the hens.”

but he holds out hope for you if you betake yourself on a long trip, preferably over the sea. Apparently his desire is to get you as far away from him as possible; the igloos of Iceland, the T.N.T. fields of China, among the “heads” of New Guinea or on the top of Mt. Neverest—they are all one to him. He advises you to drop your business (an awkward thing to do if you are in the crockery line) and predicts that either you will return almost like a human being, or you will be just another of Nature's mistakes rectified by erasure.

But, dear reader, according to the law of averages, how often does the “Put” side of your bank-book score over the “Take” columns decisively enough to enable you to emulate the skipper of the schooner Hesperus, or even the man who essayed to cross the Atlantic on his uppers.