Every human molecule, unless he be the victim of dry-rot in the emotional uplift or borer in the ego, must have experienced, at some time, the great primeval urge to pack his “boy-proof” and trek over the bulge of the horizon.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself has said,
I itch to hit the “wild and free,”
To feel the sandflies biting me,
To wear the caveman's bronze and dust,
I'll have to hit the track——or Bust.

These poignant words by the wellknown poet and traveller, Buzzoff, aptly illustrate the mental metamorphosis known in less scientific language as “the call of the open throttle.” It is an emotional reaction common to all classes of society, from the landed to the stranded gentry of the world; else, what is it that prompts ladies whose blood is genealogically blue, to defy the Great Unknown with only a lip - stick and a tinted bodyguard? What is it that causes the superannuated colonel's trigger - finger to itch so excruciatingly that he needs must hasten off into the impenetrable jungles of Foozledum-land intent on shoot- page 11 ing rhynosorobulls and snapdragons on the wing? Why do engine - drivers go on walking tours, and postmen profess a weakness for roller-skating? Why do salty sea-captains reap the seagrass off their chins and become country hotelkeepers? Change, dear reader—the deep-rooted fickleness which lurks in the cerebrum of every mortal, except him with a permanent wave in his jovialty complex and a soul that functions with the mechanical precision of a cash register. Change— not small change, but the variety composed ten-tenths of overproof inquisitiveness which makes a corner as irresistible to the average optic as the spectacle of other people working, and urges the bifurcated biped to park the daily task sine die, and project himself thither by foot, rail and motor. Curiosity—the irresistible accelerator of man's progression—which goads him on to obscure parts of the globe to see (for instance) if it is really true that the popple-bird flies upside down to keep the sun out of its eyes, and to test the truth of the allegation concerning the hypnotic power of the black-bottom bustard in Central Syncopatia.

The Spectacle of Other People Working.

As evidence of the above great truths, let us quote the titles of some of the travel books we have not read:—

Over the Himalayas on a Ham Sandwich.
Bed-hunting in Strange Domains.
Across the Sahara on the Water-wagon.
Over Niagara in a Fit of Optimism.
Ten Years on the Rocks.
Through Insomnia on a Kapok.
Pursued by Duns in the wilds of Insolvency.
Eaten Alive by Curiosity.
Moonlight Filts from Flat to Flat.

There is, in truth, a time in the lives of all men when they can no longer resist the call of the bowser; when the inner meaning of a Honolulu bathing suit and an ice-cream cone is suddenly revealed to them; when January pokes a freckled nose round the office door and emits vocal vibrations which resemble the gurgling cry of the surfbather, the hiss of a boiling billy, the purring of “double, balloons,” the crackling of sunburn, and the whang of the niblick, all combined in a love lyric.

For January, the brightest and best of Time's twelve daughters, is a good sport, and her second name is Holid'ys. She carries a kick in every corpuscle and a jazz melody under her kit. She whisks you away to bush, beach and bach, where Sol's violet rays accelerate your blood-pressure and rebuild your depleted tissues, making Coue-ism and monkey-glands look as dilapidated as a crate of eggs in a motor smash.

What prompted Stephenson to squander his beauty-sleep in devising a means of fitting wheels on a kettle? Why did that renowned exponent of the infernal-combustion mode of transport create his famous bounding bedstead?

Why—because these pioneers of celerity recognised that the human horizon was controlled by the limitations of man's pedals, and by prefixing “heels” with a W they made wheels for the weary.

Horseflesh and Horsepower

There was a period when the horse was man's noble friend and ally, when he was cared for

The Black-Bottom Bustard of Central Syncopatia.

even as the “flying five” and the “epileptic eight” are to-day. In tropical climates he even wore a straw bonnet. To-day he functions beneath a metal bonnet and is called horsepower. Ay, verily, the noble quadruped has been potted, page 12 tinned and canned to serve man's lust for lubricated locomotion.

The mental association of horses and holidays takes me back twenty years along the track of time, to the days—before horsepower superseded horse flesh—of the coach and five-horse team. The journey—from Waitara to Awakino—was an Odyssey through one of the most beautiful parts of New Zealand, over a mountain billowing with greenery, across a writhing band of quicksilver which revealed itself as a river, along a twisting road bounded in many places by lofty ramparts of split and rifted papa and splashed by the bright green of young flax and topped by overhanging fern-palms and foliage, which, to the uplifted gaze, conveyed the impression of a hanging forest. We skirted the brinks of cliffs, where, below, the Tasman rollers pounded at the rocks and retreated with long troughs, creamy with swaying lacework. To-day, the motor crashes over this road, but it is a poor vehicle from which to assimilate the glory of Nature. I must admit that the coach-horses of twenty years ago were hardly models of equine perfection; they were for the most part, hammerheaded, razor - backed, ribby prads but they certainly caused the road to recede beneath their hocks in commendable fashion. Their steady gait suggested that they had been wound up, like mechanical toys, before the journey.

Defied the Laws of Gravity along the Edge.

A Coach Party

We were a mixed freight when we boarded the coach at half-past seven in the morning. Those present included a lady schoolteacher, a bush contractor, a station cook, a shearer, and a commercial traveller. It is on record that no journey has ever been made, either on foot, wheel or wing, without a commercial traveller being among those present.

The last alcoholic oasis before entering the thirsty King Country is Urenui. Here every male passenger was imbued with the spirit which has made it possible for a camel to place sufficient moisture in cold storage to last it across the desert.

“To beer or not to beer,” does not apply here; everyone “beers.”

If there had ever been any metal on the road which winds over Mount Messenger it had long since disappeared beneath the mud, which reached almost to the taunted swingletrees. The incline and the mud combined to make the ascent a cruel one for the horses, and the male passengers were ordered to walk to the top. The only footpath was a comparatively hard strip on the extreme edge of the road (about a foot in width), from which we could look down on to the tops of the trees in the gullies below. It was here that we lost the station cook. When he boarded the coach at Waitara the neck of a whisky bottle had obtruded itself from his pocket, and during the journey the whisky had been transferred from the bottle to the interior of the cook. In the process of absorption he had become something of a burden, the delusion that he was Bob Fitzsimmons and Gentleman Jim Corbett combined, gaining strength with the bottle's exhaustion.

It was not until we congregated at the top of the mountain that he was missed.

”'E'll ‘ave to walk, blarst ‘im,” snorted the “coachey,” and we skidded down the other side of the mountain without him. He arrived two days later with dry fern in his hair and a generous portion of New Zealand on his clothes.

It was after we had crossed the mountain that the schoolteacher came into prominence. Her dress-basket eluded its lashings and bounded on to the road, where it burst asunder and scattered its contents in a most immodest manner. The shearer and the C.T. illustrated the fact that the age of chivalry is not dead, but it was an embarrassing time for all concerned. Sufficient it is to say that those were the days when ladies really Did wear clothes, and the schoolteacher possessed at least “two of Everything.”

There were in those days two methods of crossing the Mokau River, but most people preferred to cross on the punt as there was no bridge. There is something attractive—especially to a Scot—in crossing page 13 a river on a coach on a punt; it smacks of getting two rides for one fare—hoots! Apparently something had come unstuck in the harness department during the journey, for when we essayed to pull off the punt and “coachey” shouted “R-r-r-r-umph Darky, r-r-r-r-umph Bess,” only the leader marched off and left the rest of the team standing. “Coachey” was jerked off his box and came to rest with a hand on the rump of each of the “polers.” Only a bullock would be equal to translating what “coachey” said.

Noah established Henley-on-the-Mount.

By the time we neared Awakino, where the road literally hangs on the edge of the cliffs, I was the sole survivor of the original freight. We had dropped the others off at different points along the road.

Here “coachey” met a friend, and handed over the ribbons while he retired to the interior of the coach for refreshment and repose. The friend had imbibed just sufficiently deeply to incite him to the belief that he was the incarnation of Desperado Dick, the daredevil driver of the Rockies, for he cursed the team into a gallop, and defied the laws of gravity along the edge of the cliff. We were seldom on two wheels at once, and never on four. I gazed passionately, straight down into the Tasman, and felt the wild waves already closing over my ears. As far as Daredevil Dick was concerned the road was perfectly straight, flat and smooth. He refused to believe otherwise, and contemptuously ignored the existence of bends, hills and holes. The experience was akin to a combination of logrolling, riding the air-pockets, and “asking father's consent.”

Eventually, thanks to the Power which looks after, infants and “drunks,” we reached our destination in one piece.

Picnics and Sandwiches

So much for such excursions and alarms. While on the subject of holid'ys let's touch on “picnics.”

Who was it who invented the picnic? Was it Julius Caesar when he arranged his first personally-conducted daylight excursion to the shores of Britain, and ate a pickled gherkin under the cliffs of Dover, or was it Noah, who established Henley-on-the-Mount? We know, of course, who was responsible for the national picnic confection which consists of two layers of sand and a piece of mustard held together by two slices of bread, and commonly known as the sandwich. History avers that this quick-lunch accessory was the morbid conception of a noble gentleman who, driven to desperation by the continual toughness of the meat, ordered it to be placed between shock absorbers. Ignoring historical inaccuracies, it remains a fact that picnics without sandwiches would not be picnics.

Apart from the attraction of straining billy-tea through the front teeth, hunting the ham in the sandwich provides the greatest fun at a picnic, and adds the necessary leavening of competition, without which any human gathering is null and void.

The Dodgems made the centre of the road the direct route to the Mortuary.

Do you remember those old-fashioned picnics in which we participated in our tender youth, when father pushed the pram o'er hill and dale, and mother carried the fruit in a string kit for all the world to see, and a dog flew at Willie and had to be chased by father with a stick; when father page 14 stroked the nose of every horse that poked its head over a fence, and mother said: “You'll do that once too often Alfred,” and all us children thought what a recklessly courageous man was our father. How, when eventually we reached the mud-flats, we all followed father out to sea and searched for pippies. How mother, from the security of her “warren” among the rushes, chanted at two-minute intervals, “Come and get a sandwich, Hector!” and “Hold Winnie's hand, Walter!”

How we all trailed home at sundown like a routed army, with father in the van doggedly pushing the pram, with his shoulders hunched over the handles. How Willie snivelled the whole way home because he had cut his toe and had to carry his boot. How desirable home looked when at last it hove in sight, and how father boiled all the pippies in the big iron pot, and we fell asleep over our plates and had to be carried to bed?

A Popular Holiday Resort.
“The Hermitage,” Mt. Cook, South Island, New Zealand

Ah, but those were the days—before the “dodgems” made the centre of the road the direct route to the mortuary. But why resort to retrospection, which is the sleeping partner of Old Age.

January will always be January, and Holid'ys Bear no Date-Stamp.