Tons Of Marbles.

We'Re off, Trainlanders! Off to visit some beautiful marble halls. To visit them is much more enjoyable than merely dreaming about them, don't you think? Which reminds us of the wistful gypsy maiden in that favourite opera, “The Bohemian Girl.” She was always dreaming of dwelling in marble halls.

A marble road at the top of the South Island takes us to Maoriland's halls of gleaming white crystal, which are set high up on the hills overlooking Golden Bay.

These marble quarries are so big that they have provided material for hundreds of buildings throughout New Zealand, including the imposing Parliament Buildings in Wellington.

Big machines cut out blocks of all shapes and sizes from the walls in these marble halls and many of the blocks are veined with the loveliest rainbow colours.

What piles of marbles for your marble bags you could make here, and what beauties! But the majority of marbles are made of glass or clay. Aggies, as you know, are made from Onyx, a kind of agate which comes from Brazil, Germany and India.

You would not need pennies to buy marbles if you were Frank Mitchell, a little American boy whose father owns the factory where “aggies” are made. Frank sees how they are made whenever he goes along to fill his pockets with them.

Four-ton blocks of Onyx are sliced into slabs, seven-eights of an inch thick. These slabs are cut into cubes. The cubes, in trays of two hundred, are then carried to a rolling grinder where they are ground and polished into marbles.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Supposing we all set about building a factory in these New Zealand marble halls and start making real marbles—marbles made from marble? Wouldn't it be fun?

If we did we would need a forbidding notice outside “No Visitors With Pockets Allowed”; otherwise, all our precious marbles would soon disappear and we would have none left to sell!

Let's keep the good old game going and then there will be a roaring trade awaiting us.

Meanwhile, Good Winnings, Trainlanders!