Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/114

66 leather pouch or bag slung in front of him. In his hand he carried a box-like affair holding a row of tickets in blocks of various colors. To aid him in removing the tickets he carried on his breast a small sponge, with which he frequently moistened his thumb and forefinger. When I handed him a coin, his hand dropped into the bag. Immediately there was a great rattling. The conductor was drawing on his stock of coppers, each as big as a half-dollar, but worth only two cents. As most of his fares were pennies, quarts of coin seemed not unknown to him. Just past a corner our car was stopped. Something had happened.

"What is the trouble?" I asked a man. "They put a bloke off," said he. "There were too many in the car."

Too many in the car! Oh, America! To me Auckland held a special interest. Here the globe-girdling fleet of the United States Navy had been generously entertained in 1908, and I knew that New Zealand's second capital had begun life on the banks of a creek seventy years before. At that time this stream flowed undisturbed into Waitemata Harbor; on this day its channel, filled, and paved with asphalt, was known as Queen Street, the business centre of the city. New Zealand has no other street like Queen Street It is the city's connecting link with the world beyond the sea. At its foot anchor steamers that trade to all the continents and to the islands of the South Seas. There