XXI NORTH AGAIN
I am glad to have seen Gore and met its genial, hospitable citizens, but I am not sorry to get away, since during my stay a blizzard of great virulence has been raging. A tantalising kind of weather indeed. For occasionally there would be a burst of brilliant sunshine and the sky would look serene. Then with amazing celerity a black mass of cloud would arise from behind the ranges, overspread the sky, and burst upon us in a perfect hurricane of biting blast and blinding snow. But upon entering the train and starting for the north it was wonderful to see how rapidly we ran out of it into balmy, summer weather, until when we reached Dunedin we seemed to have entered another season altogether than winter, as fine a day indeed as heart could desire.
I might just remark here that the New Zealand Government Railway rolling stock is all American, but the cars are of mixed type, some being like our corridor cars at home, only with the corridor wired at the side instead of being perfectly closed in like ours, and others of the open American type, seats on each side with a middle aisle. They are fairly comfortable, but the speed is slow, even on the express trains the pace is only about twenty-five miles an hour. The line is usually single and laid American fashion, that is, the rails are spiked down to the sleepers with hold-fast nails in a fashion that to us at home seems quite casual and temporary. The officials are genial, but being Government servants, which always seems to mean something different to public servants, they do not waste any time in superfluous civility, and they come down upon any hapless passenger who unwittingly infringes a bye-law with draconian severity. But with all that they are courtesy and gentleness personified when compared with the autocrats on the American railways, who actually resent savagely being spoken to civilly, and proceed to insult a passenger who is accustomed to speak to those whom he pays to serve him as he would like to be spoken to himself. Our Colonial brethren do not make that grim mistake, though quick to resent any needless assumption of superiority.
It has been a great pleasure to renew my acquaintance with Dunedin, and to note the development of its shipping facilities, as well as the way in which the high character of the city architecturally and structurally has been maintained and developed, although the latter phase is much less important than I was prepared to find it. But principally I was interested in Port Chalmers, that idyllic spot for beauty of situation which has been left stranded, as it were, in its little nook by the passing of the traffic up the tortuous estuary to Dunedin. It is almost as it was when I last saw it, thirty-one years ago, in a state of arrested development. With the exception of three of the Union Company's steamers, which were lying there coaling, the port was deserted, instead of having quite a fleet of fine sailing ships such as used to lie at its wharves in my day. Such traffic as it has now is confined to the large steamers of Messrs. Shaw Savill, the New Zealand Shipping Company, and others which do manage to get up as far as this, but seldom venture up to Dunedin, as being too risky and involving besides too much loss of time. I really experienced all that sense of everything being dwarfed and mean, such as so often strikes a boy upon revisiting the scenes of his youth in some sleepy village or some small town after being away in the great world for years.
The only change of any importance noticeable was that a fine new dry dock was being dug, which, I have no doubt, will be a very great boon to the big ships which call here, but I should think will be mainly used by the fine vessels of the Union Company. So I bade farewell to the pretty little old-fashioned place, with its lovely views over land and sea, and sped on over the railway towards Christchurch (it was being commenced when I was here thirty-two years ago) past the picturesque place where I once essayed farming—Purakanui—and catching occasional glimpses of beautiful bays, all silted up and worthless for navigation or shelter except by the smallest craft, to the thriving towns of Waitati, Oamaru, and Timaru. This is the unsheltered coast-line known as the ninety-mile beach, where the communication with the land depends upon the weather, but the richness and fertility of the great plain extending inland assures the prosperity of the towns studded along the harbourless shore.
It is pleasant travelling, especially on a day like this, for the train although slow is very comfortable, and there is an excellent dining-car with good and plentiful food at a low rate compared with what is to be found in any other country in the Old World or America. And here I think it only just to say that wherever I have travelled out here I have found the same thing—the very best of food, plainly but excellently cooked and nicely served at a very low cost. I know that my ideas in the matter of food are considered to be old-fashioned and heterodox, but I cannot help that; my deliberate opinion is that in the matter of food which is honest and good without being ambitiously messy and ostentatiously disguised, the Antipodes can challenge the world. As far as food is concerned, it is like travelling from one home to another.
The extent and fertility of this great plain, bounded on one side by the sea and on the other, far inland, by snow-capped ranges of mountains, is very impressive, and when occasionally the train pulls up at a thriving, bright town like Ashburton, and the traveller notes the neatness of the roads and comfortable appearance of the buildings, and the utter absence of squalor and grinding poverty, such as are, alas! too noticeable at way stations in America and in our own country, he feels a glow of satisfaction at being permitted to pass through such a land of plenty and of peace. And so we roll on into the thriving city of Christchurch, which is built entirely on the flat and is consequently not so picturesque or imposing as Auckland, Wellington, or Dunedin, but gives an impression of solid prosperity as well as of great extent, remembering always the number of its population.