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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 6 (September 1, 1937.)

Seasonal Seizures

Seasonal Seizures.

That is the worst of wives. They are prone to mistake man's joyous idealism for bone laziness. Spring produces in them an unidealistic urgency that, to the meditative male, is most indecent. To them a spring hat is a rhapsody in “Oh,” but the multitudinous manifestations of Nature's necromancy only incite them to materialistic notions calculated to put the skids under Romance and the spade into a husband's hand. They read the gardening notes aloud to their bitter halves who fain would toy with abstract ideals unrelated to early cabbages and the propagation of parsley.

“A cabbage that no one but an assassin could bear to cut off in its prime.”

“A cabbage that no one but an assassin could bear to cut off in its prime.”

They say with sinister determination: “I see that now is the time to sprinkle potash of perlmutter over the lillium bed.”

“Um,” replies the victim of Spring. “It says here that all dandylion and daisy should be removed from the lawn before top-dressing and replanting.”

“Ah,” replies the marital burden-bearer.

“Rose trees should now be sprayed with deodorised dillwater,” orates the domestic dream-shatterer.

“Woof,” grunts the sharer of family joys and sorrows.

“All ground should be finally turned over and treated with chloride of culpepper for spring sewing,” cries the marital mentor.

“Yah!” fumes the hounded husbandman.

“Climbing roses should be tied back and squirted with a solution of methylated mothballs, daffodils should be—“

“Bah!” snorts the disillusioned illusionist; but he knows what is going to happen to him this spring. It happened to him last spring. He looks forward to the day when he will page 51 be too old to wield a weeder or sock a sod; when he will sit, undisturbed by the utilitarian tenacity of his spousish springbok, and drink deep of the spirit of spring.

Such is the way of the greatest minds. John Ruskin was a devoted observer of Nature's nuances, but it's long odds that he never taught a baby turnip to turn or a spring onion to spring.