Page:Emeraldhoursinne00lowtiala.djvu/168

84 have any spare time I like to go to Sydney or the South Sea Islands, or right away home!”

“And then you systematically go to Madame Tussaud’s and the Tower and National Gallery that Londoners leave alone for the edification of tourists!” laughed Captain Greendays. “I suppose we are all very much alike after all, quite unable to appreciate the things that belong to us.”

And then as we wended our way towards the Canadian Court, which they had chosen as the most important to show us, we asked the meaning of the crowded streets.

“Oh, that is the ordinary Saturday night crowd in all New Zealand towns,” they told us. “Most of the shops close on Thursdays or Wednesdays out here, you know, instead of on Saturdays, and the whole population turns out on Saturday nights,—it is a sort of shop-parade.”

We spent a very orthodox Sunday,—late breakfast, service in the cathedral that over-shadows the city by its height and size that are so enormous in proportion to all the buildings in the vicinity, an afternoon of letter-writing and reading, and service in the evening in St. Michael’s Church, the first church built in Canterbury.

On Monday we again went to the Exhibition, as of course we had not seen very much of it on Saturday night, and nothing at all outside the main building. We now had the Maori Pa to visit, where we witnessed a haka danced by Rotorua natives, and when we saw the children diving in real hot mud pools for pennies we felt transported back again to that land of sulphur and steam. The Agricultural Department’s most interesting court occupied us for a long time. They have an apiary in full working order, sheep-shearing by machinery, fruit and vegetable drying machines, incubators with their foster-mothers and broods, &c., &c., a most instructive show for the farmers and also for others than farmers who are at all interested in country life. Upstairs the technical schools have their exhibits, and these show results that are very flattering indeed to the enterprise of the Department of Education.

To Christchurch the chief attraction at the Exhibition is “Wonderland,” a sort of Earl’s Court, where there are water-chutes and all the rest of the whirligig shows. But we liked the picture, or art, gallery best, and grieved that we had so little time to spend in it.