A CLIMBER IN NEW ZEALAND
CHAPTER I
DESCRIPTIVE AND HISTORICAL
We took the path our fathers trod,
With swinging stride, and brave:
The thews we have, the hearts we hold,
Are what our fathers gave.
Wandering through an English village, not so many years ago, a friend chanced upon a dame’s school in which New Zealand was being described as “some small islands off the coast of Australia, infested with rabbits”; and only three years ago my wife was asked by a lady in the Lyceum Club, in London, if the Maoris were still cannibals, and if there were tigers in the jungle! It is not, perhaps, surprising, then, that astonishment should still be expressed when the statement is made that New Zealand has Alps and glaciers vieing in grandeur and in beauty with those of Switzerland. Distant fields are green, but seldom white; and New Zealand is a Far Country. The New Zealander, however, born and bred fifteen thousand miles away, still calls England “Home.” Long may he continue to do so! He knows more of England than England knows of him, and in time of stress he will cheerfully give, out of his slender means, a battle-cruiser as an object-lesson to the world; or, in time of danger, dye the veldt with his own red blood. And there will be nothing of selfishness in the sacrifice, as has sometimes been hinted to me by the Little Englander.
But, reverting to the main question, this ignorance in regard to the Outer Empire, which still prevails, reminds one of the story told by a well-known author on mountaineering, who once saw in the parlour of a cottage in England a wonderful erection of what appeared to be brown paper and shavings, built up in rock-like fashion, covered with little toy-box trees and dotted here and there with bits of mirror glass and cardboard houses. “What,” inquired the visitor, “may this be?” “That,” said the owner of the house, very slowly, “is the work of my late ’usband—a representation of the Halps, as close as ’e could imagine it, for ’e never was abroad.”