Chapter 34 - Page 2

whizzing green Ballarat flies in the room, with his stunning
buzz-saw noise--the swiftest creature in the world except the
lightning-flash. It is a stupendous force that is stored up in that
little body. If we had it in a ship in the same proportion, we could spin
from Liverpool to New York in the space of an hour--the time it takes to
eat luncheon. The New Zealand express train is called the Ballarat Fly
. . . . Bad teeth in the colonies. A citizen told me they don't have
teeth filled, but pull them out and put in false ones, and that now and
then one sees a young lady with a full set. She is fortunate. I wish I
had been born with false teeth and a false liver and false carbuncles.
I should get along better.

December 2. Monday. Left Napier in the Ballarat Fly the one that goes
twice a week. From Napier to Hastings, twelve miles; time, fifty-five
minutes--not so far short of thirteen miles an hour . . . . A perfect
summer day; cool breeze, brilliant sky, rich vegetation. Two or three
times during the afternoon we saw wonderfully dense and beautiful
forests, tumultuously piled skyward on the broken highlands--not the
customary roof-like slant of a hillside, where the trees are all the same
height. The noblest of these trees were of the Kauri breed, we were told
the timber that is now furnishing the wood-paving for Europe, and is the
best of all wood for that purpose. Sometimes these towering upheavals of
forestry were festooned and garlanded with vine-cables, and sometimes the
masses of undergrowth were cocooned in another sort of vine of a delicate
cobwebby texture--they call it the "supplejack," I think. Tree ferns
everywhere--a stem fifteen feet high, with a graceful chalice of
fern-fronds sprouting from its top--a lovely forest ornament. And there
was a ten-foot reed with a flowing suit of what looked like yellow hair
hanging from its upper end. I do not know its name, but if there is such
a thing as a scalp-plant, this is it. A romantic gorge, with a brook
flowing in its bottom, approaching Palmerston North.

Waitukurau. Twenty minutes for luncheon. With me sat my wife and
daughter, and my manager, Mr. Carlyle Smythe. I sat at the head of the
table, and could see the right-hand wall; the others had their backs to
it. On that wall, at a good distance away, were a couple of framed
pictures. I could not see them clearly, but from the groupings of the
figures I fancied that they represented the killing of Napoleon III's son
by the Zulus in South Africa. I broke into the conversation, which was
about poetry and cabbage and art, and said to my wife--

"Do you remember when the news came to Paris----"

"Of the killing of the Prince?"

(Those were the very words I had