Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/57

 found the butter particularly excellent, and the mutton is better than the turkey An American I met today says that in New Zealand it is no uncommon thing to see girls of fourteen with complete sets of false teeth; that something in the water here is very hard on teeth.

—The meals and rooms at the Hotel Royal are so good that we are almost ashamed to accept them at $2.62 per day each. The taxi system here is also very agreeable. In most cities, taxis are disreputable-looking vehicles you are almost ashamed to ride in. Here they are new automobiles of different makes, and they cannot be distinguished from private vehicles. Today we rode about in a Cadillac of 1913 model that had been in service only three weeks. The charge was $3.12 per hour. At home the Cadillac costs about $2,000; here it costs a third more. The driver told us he paid forty cents a gallon for gasoline (known as petrol here); we pay about eighteen cents a gallon. An exposition will be opened here in nine or ten months, and the buildings are being erected in a park adjoining the city. We went out in the Cadillac to see them, and it was very pleasant to hear the sound of the open muffler again, for Auckland is a very hilly city. One park we visited consists of four hundred acres, and it was given to the city by Sir John Logan Campbell. Before he died, citizens of Auckland erected a statue in his honor, and he was present at the unveiling, which seemed to