By this time Captain Greendays had his risible muscles well under control, and he had finished his chop, though we were still struggling with ours. So he met her gaze manfully and said with an appearance of the deepest interest,
“Indeed? That is very interesting. Would you kindly hand me a clean plate?”
The Abigail took away the plate with its lonely little bone, and Mrs Greendays said, with a carefully restrained ripple of laughter,
“How absurd you are, Tom!”
But her reproof seemed to act upon him as a stimulus, for,
“Thank you so much!” he said to our waitress as she put a fresh plate before him, and added, “I wonder if you can enlighten me, Madam, on a mystery that I have pondered over often and long. Why is it that men who make a failure of every other calling under the sun invariably take to hotel-keeping? It is a profession that needs the most delicate tact, the widest knowledge of human nature, an almost divine combination of generosity and economy, vast patience, Napoleonic powers of insight and strategy, and above all, incomparable manners. But how many of these qualities, all of which, I assure you, Madam, are indispensable to the making of a fair specimen of the genus host, do the gentlemen aspiring to such positions in New Zealand possess?”
But the lady, whose spectacles had gradually risen to her high brow during this harangue, of which she had naturally understood not more than three words, had of course no reply, and undoubtedly regarded Captain Greendays as the lunatic his wife in a stage aside pronounced him.
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A Maori Meeting House
