PIONEERING.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 35, 18 March 1914, Page 4

PIONEERING.

Pioneers in every country live more or less in the middle of adventure. The Australian ""back- of beyond" has a special brand of its own, and its hardships are mostly connected with heat and drought. In.Canada, there are the orthodox wild beasts and wild people. An Australian girl who went out to Alaska to marry a young mining man has returned to civilisation with tales of many experiences exciting and amusing, says a writer in the "BritishAustralasian. "

She comes to England, by the way, at half a day 's as seems to> be the fate of wives of mining men, and left her house, furniture, silver, wedding presents, and most of her clothes, just as they happened to be, trusting to fate and one or two friends to look after them.

"Cook" in this girl's new Alaska home, was a person of fifty years and seventen stone, who had been brought up in mining camps and had acquired at least a generous measure of its picturesque vocabulary. This fearsome person had divorced two husbands, and was saving up 75 .dollars to get rid of a third, with the object of marrying a man who was also engaged in saving 75 dollars for divorce proceedings against his second wife. One morning, through the thin partition of her borrowed house —the only one available in the district—Mrs K heard both sides of a telephone conversation between cook and the grocer. Something had not been sent punctually, and out came cook's mining camp language in an astonishing, alarming, and absolutely unrepeatable flowy of mixed Canadian and Indian abuse. "Very well, Mrs K ," said the grocer, "I shall send it round at once." A man cook in a district further north refused to stay on her arrival. ''l haven't seen a white woman for 30 years,'' he explained, '' and I'm not going to see one. It's not that I'm afraid of my language —but I might serve her on the wrong side." She was saved the horrors of being without a cook on this occasion. The' man had lost in the snow on his way there, and, being half paralysed, was unable to set out on the trail again without an escort, which was naturally, under the circumstances, refused.