AFFLICTED UNCLE’S APPEAL.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3190, 8 April 1911, Page 4

AFFLICTED UNCLE’S APPEAL.

PROBLEM OF A “HEALTHY” NEPHEW.

A charming little comedy, flavoured with a dash of the proolem play, is berng enacted in the advertisement columns of the “Times ”

On February 3rd the following announcement was inserted:—

•‘Uncle afflicted with sole guardianship of healthy nephew, aged twelve, would be glad to receive information of a school conducted on good, old-fash-ioned lines, free from all maudlin modern ideas, and where the sound rule of ‘Spare the rod and spoil ‘the child’ is strictly observed.” Here we have the somewhat testy, middle-aged uncle—an uncle who is probably a terror to the small boys in the neighbourhood in which he* resides: doubtless a bachelor, and one whose idea of perfect bliss is to spend several hours of the day asleep in a comfortable armhair before liis club smoking-room fire, sitting on, the very journal in which he advertises. And on this worthy is inflicted a bov of twelve—a “healthy” nephew; tli*e boy is a boy who like practical jokes; a nephew who will cause pins to stand upright on the seat of uncle’s chair, who will cunningly devise sundry subtle schemes of torture for his grCunpy guardian. ;■■ ' . . ‘ -

And what does uncle's advertisement produce P So portentous a document as a Government Bhie Book has just informed us that this is an age of silly sentimentalism, of mistaken sympathy with wrongdoers, of maudlin old-maidish-ness.