At the railway station we found a little boy in uniform who wanted to insure our lives! The reason for his anxiety was that we might suffer harm in the tunnel. ‘It’s only a penny, sir, and we insure nearly everybody.’
In the Colonies they will insure you against a heartache. At the book-store I observed a notice that anyone found after a railway accident with a copy of the Daily Chronicle (if I remember rightly), issued on the day of the disaster, in his possession would receive £500.
After a rough-and-tumble night, crammed in a small cabin with three sick passengers, I was not sorry to find that we were steering into Wellington. On all sides there were high and irregular hills. Some of them on the left were capped with snow. The view was by no means so smooth in its outlines as on entering Lyttelton. The hills, instead of being round and green, were ragged and brown. Wellington is situated at the foot of these hills at the head of the bay. The position seemed to be snug and quiet, but we soon discovered it was quite the contrary.
Wellington seems to have been built in a sort of natural funnel, through which there is a perpetual gale of wind. You can always tell a man from Wellington, for wherever he goes he will grip hold of his hat on turning a corner. When we got ashore we found that we had to grip our hats, and could quite understand how a prolonged residence at Wellington might lead to an instinctive desire to save your hat on turning a corner.
We had a talk with a resident about the winds of Wellington.
‘Wind, indeed! Why, it’s only a week or so ago when a whole girls’ school was blown clean out to sea. Now they have invented a way for reefing their petticoats. Too much sail doesn’t do in these parts. All the nursemaids and children never turn out now without carrying a small kedge and a few fathoms of chain hooked to their perambulators.’
‘Good for windmills,’ I remarked.
‘Yes, we thought so, until we tried them. One was blown away and landed somewhere up amongst the Maoris, who refused to return it, saying that it had been presented to them last year by a gentleman from Australia. The other mill we anchored down, but when it once commenced to move, we were never able to stop it.’
‘And how was that?’ said I, and I was told the story of