AUSTRALIA'S COFFEE CRITICIZED BY TWAIN
D. M. Dow, at the Poetry Centre Meeting, Tells of Quips at His Country's Expense.
Although Mark Twain found Australia full of fine literary material, his remarks when he visited that country in 1895 were not always flattering, D. M. Dow, official secretary for Australia to the United States, told a group of thirty persons yesterday afternoon at National Poetry Centre in the RCA Building, Rockefeller Center.
Mr. Dow related two of Twain's "insults." First, the author criticized the constellation that is visible in Australia, the Southern Cross. Mr. Dow said that the author had said that the Cross was "ingeniously named because it looks just like a cross would look if it looked like something else."
The second caustic remark was made on a visit to a sheep station. Australia being a tea-drinking nation, the author had found its coffee unsatisfactory. He watched when the animals were injured their wounds were smeared with tar. He remarked:
"Well, that is interesting. I did wonder where you Australians got your railroad station coffee."
Mr. Dow lamented that Twain should so often be considered merely as a humorist, and he urged them to read "The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of George Holland" as an example of the writer's seriousness in attacking shams and hypocrisy.
Miss Anita Browne presided and Mrs. Louise L. Thurber and Mrs. Ida Benfey Judd, president of the Mark Twain Association, also spoke.
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