Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/113

There are no transfers here; if you travel on three different lines, you pay three fares. . . . Every morning our waiter at the hotel brings us hot cakes, although we do not order them. We discovered the reason today: on the bill of fare they are called "hot cakes, American style." It is the waiter's way of announcing that he knows we are Americans. . . . When you order soft-boiled eggs here, they are brought to you in the shell, and you eat them out of egg cups. This morning I asked the waiter to break mine in a glass, which he did, but he also put in pepper and salt, and stirred them up. . . . This has been a very chilly day, and the Wellington people are going about wearing overcoats and straw hats. A woman on the street car informed us that today has been as cold as the weather ever gets here, at any season. At one of the beaches we saw the surf rolling in a very boisterous and menacing way, as the wind was blowing almost a gale. But flowers are in bloom, and vegetables growing in gardens. The vegetable gardens here are in the hands of Chinese, and are wonderfully neat; almost as wonderful as the gardens about Paris, where the gardeners remove the original dirt, and make a new soil. . . . We hear complaints everywhere of the labor unions. On a street car today we engaged in conversation with an elderly woman who said she was born in Wellington, and who complained bitterly of the unions, which cause constant disturbances in all branches of business. This was surprising to me, in New Zealand, where we have heard everything is so amiable. I hear the same thing every time I talk with New Zealand people. "It is too much of a good