The Globe Trotter.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XX, Issue 6636, 28 March 1893, Page 4

The Globe Trotter.

Watchman, in the Catholio Times, on his trip to Christchurch, says :— I met a good deal of globe-trotters. Sometimes it waa n high-cheeked British matron with a false "front and eye-glasaes. Not pi nee net, or spectacles, you understand, but the old-fashioned heavy sold glasses which have to be held before the eyes, and which give the person who hold them the likeness of one who regurds some peculiarly obnoxious insect through n microscope. Sometimes it was a wealthy old English country gentleman who, Into in lifei and after the development of much and painful rotundity, had been seized with the muiia of inspecting the earth and the countries thereof. Sometimes it was something in t\ collar, n draw), and ono «:as.s eye. This was the most disgusting form of the reptile, There was one little fat man and his wife who, somewhere out of si«ht, had (i little fat baby. I don't know what they travelled for, unless to enlarge the baby's ideas. They marched, these little people, with such intense starchineas mid dignity that I was sometimes fearful tho back of their little heads would touch the backs of their little waists. They looked neither to right nor left, spoke absolutely to no one, never by any chance, in public, addressed one another, but froze each other and sill the world with the atmosphere (or blizzard) of supernatural dignity with which they were environed. They would tramp into meals with military quick step, wheel as one uv\n in front of their tables, drop into their chairs, at the srnie moment of lime, straighten their little bivcks until they arched tho wrong way, eat in tune, leave off at the same second, arise together, wheel and march out as if they were some new and expensive sort of military automatons. Subsequent investigation proved that the baby, though it couldn't walk or talk, was just as martini and just as wooden as its parents. These people will go home and write a book about the colonies. That is to be expected. But the Globe-trotters, bless you, were not happy. They couldn't help comparing that Cnristcliurch hwtol with tho JMetropole or the Grosvenor or the Albemarle, and, of course, very much to ths detriment of the Christchurch caravanserai, which is about three hundred per cent, cheaper than a swagger London hotel. They found fault with the New Zealand cooking, with the attendance, the furniture. They curved their exclusive noses at the "class of persons with whom one is brought in contact, dontcheraee." One especially high-toned old dowager told me, in awed whisper, how at some Southern town, a " coarse person actually asked my husband to take a drink with him. Quite too disgusting, wasn't it ?"' The husband, honest man, blushed and said, " Oh, well, my dear, he was a nice intelligent man, and the whiskey— this with a beaming eye-was really geod, very good indeed." But the dowager regarded the old man as a high caste Hindoo would regard one who, having crossed the " black water," was defiled.