IN THE TRAIN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14644, 1 April 1911, Page 1 (Supplement)

IN THE TRAIN.

■-• , .;. —«■" *- '■".■■ :.--./- BY FRANK JIOnTOX. ' Oxe : really .does the best one can with circumstances, and tries amid all adversity to be amiable and sleek. But when 1 love I love, and when I hate I hate with all my heart; and I hate travelling in trains. Trains are messy and gritty, and the besmirchment of them suffocates my soul. I love motoring,, and the slowness of trains wearies me half to death. This morning 1 left Wellington in such a cheery mood that when the taxi spilt one of my trunks on Lambton Quay I said next to nothing. But even this first three hours in the train has made a hash and wreck of me. The train is full of ordinary folk, but they look like cowering malevolent ghouls that shame the day. The rattle of the train is a bad ache in my bones. If I had an hour or two more to spare. I should walk. Only I must reach Napier to-night, and there is a theory that the train will reach the place by then. Tho whole distance is a mile under tho 200, and in this express train we cover it in a little over ten hours. A speed to make the brain whirl! Do you wonder I feel sick? ! . The inoess&nt clash and clatter Is a thing the nerves to shatter, / ■ And the eeaaelens grumbling rumble Keeps the weary brain astrain.— One's dream-castles surely crumble Into foolish dust and tumble In disorder that is stupid and insane, While the «low mites crawl behind us And the smuts and coal specks finding As we snarl and fret and fidget in the train, As, all out of breath, we tussle t With the language we restrain. " ' (For we know such talk from us '11 Cause commotion in the train), As we hide the things we're thinking j With hypocrisy unblinking •Mid the long-drawn tedious squalors of the '■':■" train. "r That's pretty poor verse, oven for a bilious impromptu; but the train makes! one feel even worse than that. We shall j be in Palmerston in' a fow minutes, and j there, when I have posted these season- j able words, I shall sit morose in .a corner j of my birdcage and repel intruders with my fierce aspect! That is what helps to make our trains j so hideous— absence of privacy. In | the old-time trains one could sit in one's ! box and bribe the sympathetic guard to j lock the door." But we've done away with j all that decent comfort now. If I put my | books down on a vacant seat beside me. i some awful old woman will come along j and, "If you don't mind '"—glaring at j me the while as if I were some specially horrid new type of Fenian. •■ I shouldn't mind the vile publicity of trains so; much if strange people would not blow in out of the unknown, and drag jme into wearisome conversations. Never I were such grim Job's comforters as these j train casuals. I wandered into the. smoker just now, and > I had barely gob I my pipe alight before a fellow with a ! swollen waistcoat asked, " How far 're yer goin*?" I answered in a breath—" Napier—Port , Wariganui—Hamilton —Cambridge—Botorua— Auckland— Wliangarei—Taupo. Don't know where else. Not had time to decide yet. Too busy." ~/„/, Will you, believe that that inspeakable Boeotian, having told me of certain dis- ! tressing symptoms attributed to his Napier aunt, : proceeded to regale me with his account of -the-dust on the Rotorua line? I could have strangled him. I didn't, and I'm still wondering why. / •' / I've heard of that dust on the Botorua line iso, often that I know it thoroughly, and shall be able to recognise every separate speck as an old acquaintance. ;At its worst, it can't be as bad as the dust of Christehurch, because there is no dust anywhere worse than the dust of Christchurch, unless there should be dust in that pilaee that is only mentioned in society by ; fatted bookmakers ;, and escapejfc Evangelists. Christchurich dust testes exactly like mouldy inferior snuff, that has blown through a : very foul stable during an epidemic of mumps. The red dust of Koolgardie is snow by comparison. So that I dare say I shall not find the dust so awful on : the Rotorua line - after all; ,and I know, 'that the' Rotorua train* cannot possibly be dirtier than the Auckland trams, because in a Christian country that couldn't be allowed.