[Clipping from the Port Hume Clarion of Monday, 15 January 1923. Letters column, page 6.]

TO THE EDITOR, FROM A CITIZEN OF THE HEIGHTS

A Small Observation on the Conduct of Our Nocturnal Commerce

Madam, —

I write from 172 Rosemary Lane, where my late husband's library and my own modest study occupy the front rooms on the upper story, and where my professional reading habits have kept me at my desk, most nights of the past fourteen months, between the hours of one and three in the morning.

I write not to complain, but to observe.

In the fourteen months just mentioned, I have counted — with only the interest of a reading woman who is distracted by the lorries passing under her window — between three and five heavy commercial vehicles per week proceeding southward along Rosemary Lane in the hours between midnight and four a.m. They are not local delivery vehicles. They are larger, heavier, and they run without side-curtains so the drivers may see and be signalled to. They travel in pairs or in occasional groups of three. They bear, upon their tailgates, the corporate markings of a local machine-tool and munitions-parts firm whose name I shall not set down here, but which every reader of this newspaper will be able to identify, as they are the only firm in our city whose trucks are marked with precisely that designation. Those markings describe the vehicles as engaged in the field-testing of our firm's munitions-parts products.

I confess myself puzzled. I have not, in my fifty-three years' attention to the industrial affairs of our nation, ever heard of a munitions-parts firm testing its product in the small hours of the night, upon residential streets, at average speeds which I estimate at twenty-five to thirty miles the hour, upon a regular and sustained schedule of three to five passages per week. The testing of munitions parts is, by my understanding, a day-time and test-range undertaking.

I ask the Clarion's editor — whose acquaintance with the industrial affairs of Port Hume is reliably more expert than my own — whether there is an explanation for the pattern I describe that would satisfy a citizen of common sense. I ask this in the spirit of inquiry and not in the spirit of grievance. I have slept badly for a year and I would prefer to know why.

If the Clarion's editor shall inform me that this is the ordinary conduct of a reputable local firm, I shall desist. If the Clarion's editor shall find herself unable to so inform me, I shall continue to count, and I shall write to her again in a year with my revised observations.

I remain, with such scholarly patience as a woman of the Heights is able to command,

Your reader,

Millicent Hargrave-Thwaite 172 Rosemary Lane, Port Hume 11 January, 1923

[small editor's note at the foot, Harriss's hand:]

The Clarion thanks its correspondent for her observation. The editor regrets that she has no satisfying explanation of the pattern described to offer Mrs. Hargrave-Thwaite, and invites any reader — citizen, official, or proprietor of the firm in question — who possesses such an explanation to write to the Clarion with it. We shall print the reply. — Corine Harriss, Editor.