the Otira and will move there directly this is closed when the railway goes through!”
“Dear me!” remarked Mrs Greendays. She did not approve of the driver’s uninvited information, and less so of his intrusion into our conversation, but a look from Captain Greendays reminded her that we had nearly another day of his company before us and, she wisely refrained from any severer snub than the tone of her voice as she uttered those two words had conveyed. But I sincerely hoped that no collision would take place between the dame and either of us, and happily we saw very little of that lady after dinner, when she presided and dealt out the food like an austere, argus-eyed mistress of a charity school.
Breakfast next morning was at six, and though we were of course unable to take anything but a cup of tea at that hour we were charged half-a-crown each for it. We really grudged the 7/6 each that our night’s lodging had cost us. We had been in many places during the last fortnight where baths were not and hot water difficult to procure, the food wretched and the beds uncomfortable, but none of them were worse than “The Glacier Hotel,” and all had a redeeming feature of some kind, if only civility on the part of the inmates. But this place we had to class with the house that had so excited our ire at Tamaranui.
For a good many miles after leaving the Bealey we journeyed along a road cut out of rocky granite hills above the flinty bed of the Waimakariri, and then we suddenly seemed to be out in South Africa again,—travelling by road from Rosmead Junction to Naauwpoort, or from Maseru to Ladybrand. Only the road was better and less dusty, the kopjes were big enough to be called hills, and some of the more distant ones were snow-capped, while the two big dams, which were lakes without a tree near them, had clear blue water instead of muddy yellow! It was real veldt, though, brown, tussocky, stony, dusty veldt, with its occasional thorn-bushes in clumps and a few little flowers here and there,—I even saw two lizards, the first I had seen out here, and some small white butterflies, a locust, several horse-flies, and lots of mosquitoes. But there were no buck, no birds, no niggers, no dead oxen nor bleaching bones by the roadside,—instead a sweet whiff of briar-rose or clover now and then, such as the veldt very rarely affords.
We stopped once for the driver to exchange greetings with a roadman setting out from his cottage to begin his day’s work, and twice to pick up and deliver mails in post-boxes belonging to some station or sheep-run, but we saw no other habitation than the roadman’s until we came to a welcome belt of trees close to a tiny lake, above the bed of a river and under a hill. It was Craigenburn, the coaching stables, and we all went in to the groom’s cottage, and made a very good breakfast of tea and scones, cakes, bread, butter and jam, dispensed by the groom’s pleasant wife at a uniform charge of 1/- each.
After climbing the incline above the Craigenburn the country was more like Africa than ever, with real kopjes, lacking only the limitless expanse that is
