The totalisator, or the “tote,” as it is always called, is a score board with slots in its face. Under each slot is the number of a horse, and above each number is the amount bet on him. Another window gives the total amount put up on the race, and at the left is a board showing the dividends that the winner will pay. The “tote” pays only on the horses that win first and second places. Two thirds of the money on each race, minus the ten per cent. for the club and the government, is paid those betting on the winner, and the other third is divided among the backers of the second horse.
Seeing the throngs at the races, at football matches, and on the beaches, one feels sure that in New Zealand Jack will never be a dull boy on account of all work and no play.
CHAPTER XXX
ON THE GOVERNMENT RAILWAYS
TAKE a seat beside me on the train from Auckland to Rotorua, and see how one part of New Zealand looks out-of-doors. We shoot from the city out into a rich farming district. The fields are green with luxuriant grass, or black where the soil is being turned up for planting. Near Auckland the farms and farmhouses are small. The pioneer cabins are not so big as those in the newly cleared regions of the United States. In many places there is a scarcity of lumber. The average farmhouse is a wooden cottage of four, five, or six rooms roofed with galvanized iron and there are no barns, no stables, no outbuildings. The stock feed in the fields all the year round, for the grass is always green, and the winters are not severe.
We ride over plains covered with bush, a sort of thick scrub growth not unlike dwarf cedars, and then follow for miles the banks of the Waikato River, the largest in New Zealand. Now we are in another farming section. Here the holdings are larger. We cross a big farm where there are droves of cattle and sheep. The sheep are feeding on turnips, biting them out of the ground in which they are growing. We pass through some rolling fields that look like the blue-grass country of Kentucky and others that remind one of the meadows of old England. Here and there are groves of cabbage trees, each with its tall trunk ending in a feather duster of green leaves.
As we proceed we come into a region of ferns. They cover the hills, and in the valleys rise into trees shaped like umbrellas. The whole earth is matted with them. The tree ferns have stems as thick as a telegraph pole and some rise fifteen feet without a branch.
Farther south we enter the highlands. We pass through forests of tall trees wrapped around with vines, their wide-spreading branches thick with leaves. Many of them are loaded with flowering vines, which ornament the living as well as the dead boughs, hanging down amid the green leaves or wrapping themselves around the dead limbs to make them green again.
As we go I examine the railroad. Like all in the Dominion, it belongs to the government, and its officials are civil-service employees. The conductor, who is called the guard, comes through from time to time and punches the tickets. This is a regular feature of New Zealand travel. I hardly settle down after one punch before the guard or an inspector comes and asks for my ticket once more, and at the end of a long journey it is as full of holes as a sieve.
The smaller stations serve also as post-offices. They have signs showing that they are government savings banks and government life-insurance offices as well. At every stop a bell is rung half a minute before the train starts, and every now and then there is a five-minute halt that the passengers may get out and buy a cup of tea or a glass of whisky or beer at the hotels, which are always found close by the larger stations. The whisky is Scotch, and has a smoky, peaty taste. Tea is fourpence a cup and everyone takes it with sugar and milk; it is strong, but not bad. Coffee is not sold, for no one wants it. The New Zealanders are great eaters of meat and drinkers of tea. Nevertheless, they are generally of the lean, athletic build. I suppose this is partly on account of the exercise everyone gets in the out-of-door sports.