Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/243

 route." This was all the paper contained about the inauguration, although issued the day after the inauguration took place, and the editor's motto is: "The Natal Mercury prints all the news all the time." All American news in the Australian, New Zealand and South-African papers is equally brief and absurd. Little wonder that the English and Americans do not understand each other From the window of my room at the hotel, I can look into the office of a big wholesale house across the street. Every afternoon, the bookkeepers and stenographers may be seen drinking tea. A cup of tea at four o'clock in the afternoon is a universal custom here. Sometimes bread and butter or cakes are served with it Nearly opposite our hotel is an apartment house where a great many negro servants are employed, and a crowd of them may usually be seen in front of the servant's entrance. They are so far away that while we can hear them talk, we cannot hear what they say, and they act so much like our negroes that they seem to be talking English, although they are not. Negroes have been taken to almost every portion of the earth, and speak nearly all languages. In some of the islands of the West Indies they speak only French, having never heard anything else. In English colonies they speak English, but do not use the broad R, as do the negroes in our Southern states. Probably millions of them speak Arabic. Many of them are Mohammedans, and many of them speak Hebrew. But wherever you see them, they have the same good-natured, care-free way. In Africa, there are dozens of different tribal languages in use among the blacks, but in foreign countries the