Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/443

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Friday, April 25.—One of the passengers plays the piano a good deal, and plays it well, and I have just learned that he is a noted lion-hunter. That is the funniest combination I have ever heard of; a piano-player who is a lion-hunter. . . . There is on board a captain in the British army, and a captain in the German army. You would think they would affiliate, but they do not; on the contrary, they glare at each other. The German captain wears his uniform a good deal, and as the British captain does not, I am satisfied that he thinks the German is lacking in taste. . . . Among the passengers are two elderly men married to young wives; Germans who occupy official positions of some kind in German East Africa. They are the most loving couples on board; the old husbands always have their arms about their wives when on deck. If there is any one thing particularly fitted for privacy, it is love. I think the old gentlemen believe that the other passengers talk about them—and they do—and want to show them that their young wives are satisfied. . . . We have been having Sports today, the English gentlemen having had their way. . . . Every little while two men dash by with their legs tied together. They are practicing for the three-legged race, and have already run over two babies and one negro boy nurse. In the Ladies' Potato Race, two women fell headlong, and the exhibition of dry goods was as indelicate as that seen in a dry-goods window to show new spring underwear. There is something wrong with every woman's figure, and a potato-race brings out the irregularities.