Which means of course, that this particular ordinary person fails to discover in sleek cattle and blue-blooded sheep the barometer that measures a country's prosperity, nor does he see in a ring of well-bred horses anything that indicates the work of the progressive and scientific pastoralist.
But to the man who understands the significance of such exhibitions, the Otago Society's agricultural and pastoral summer show - the thirty-third of its kind - opened yesterday, is full of interest.
Even a misanthrope cursed with pessimism, or a dreamer with a mind soaring above mundane things, must have felt better for a visit to Tahuna Park yesterday.
Picture a stretch of clean turf, and bright sunlight playing on the vivid green of early summer; an amphitheatre, hidden among sandhills, surrounded with the soft greens and yellows of flowering lupin; a sky typical of an Otago summer; the gentlest of breezes, bringing with it a suggestion of flowers, and a breath of the Pacific Ocean, breaking softly on the beach only a few hundred yards away.
The very farmers, who live and have their being among the sweet, invigorating breezes of the uplands, or the cloying scents of blooming gorse, and whose practical minds eschew poetry, turned enthusiastically to each other, and declared that it was "a grand day".
Toil-worn agriculturists and sheep-farmers from lonely stations at the "back of beyond" regard the metropolitan show as a mighty social function, and they foregather with an enthusiasm that does one good to see.
Those who spend their time in close-packed cities, and do not know a merino from his complacent brother of Leicester, may wonder why it is that men who have not seen each other for a twelve-month, and are losers in consequence, spend the few hours of their reunion hanging over a sheep-pen, or arguing with great animation about the latest somersault in proposed land legislation.
We can only look on and wonder, but if we catch the spirit of the thing, we will be much-benefited. - ODT, 25.11.1909.
