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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 1 (April 1, 1938.)

The Homing Homo

The Homing Homo

What is home without a homo?

Even if you don't like dogs it's nice to have a man about the house. The difference between keeping a man and keeping a dog is trifling, except that you can turn a dog out at night. You turn a man out in the morning and he comes home at night—eventually. There are few men who will sleep on the doorstep, unless they're too far gone to step over it. That's practically the only difference between keeping a dog and a man. Otherwise a man about the house is as jolly and carefree as a St. Bernard with a leaning to leaning and a careless abandon with the domestic doo-dahs.

Both men and dogs are homers. Any evening you may see them, after they have had all the gaiety they can get elsewhere, making for the old mortgage-security with a steak-and-onions gleam in their eye and a lilt in their lope.

With ears flapping like lug-sails on Dogger Bank the ancestral tyke accelerates his scrapers towards home and bone as the sun sinks and the scent of stew steals over the suburbs.

Likewise the homing husband flaps his flippers towards his box of tricks and sticks with the look in his eye of Stout Cortez or Bony Mary at Haggistide. Deprive him of his perching privileges and coop-consciousness and he is as a rooster without a roost—a bird with “the bird.”

Per-adventure he may dally a while where the plump arm of Phoebe pulls the pump, but nothing but a decree absolute will keep him out of the domestic parking area when the shades of evening fall and the fumes of cooking rise.