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Chapter XXI.
THE EXHIBITION.
“Over the tops of the purple hills
Where the para shakes each frond,
Over the gullies and gliding creeks,
O’er the highest spire of the far, dim peaks,
And past all the blue beyond—
Is a land of dreams, near a land of sleep,
Where fairies, we know, all their jewels keep.”
Christchurch people say that their cathedral city is like England, which of course made us more anxious to see it, and more disposed to criticise. And as we ran along the flat country from Springfield we saw from the train windows that the land was neatly parcelled out and divided up with gorse hedges, hawthorn hedges, fences; some of the little farm-houses had red roofs that distinctly resembled tiles, with willows, Normandy poplars, and lime-trees to set them off, and even young oaks and elms now and then; there were fat white sheep and sleek dairy cattle in the pasture-lands, and an air of prosperity about it all. The tidy mind of the British yeoman was certainly evident there.
We wished that they had extended their efforts at Anglicising the place to adopting the methods of the Great Western Railway; it was awful to be kept on the thorns of suspense while this train dawdled about at stations where there never seemed to be anybody getting either on or off. It took us only fifteen minutes to get from Springfield to Sheffield, and I suppose we ought to have been rather amazed to find that we were able to get from Sheffield to Aylesbury in an hour, but this Sheffield was only seventeen miles from this Aylesbury, and
