A NEW TRAIN GAME

Hokitika Guardian, 28 December 1921, Page 4

A NEW TRAIN GAME

(By Ralph Harold Bretlierton.)

“We go through a tunnel—in loss , liiiin half a minute,” said the Ilian in j the corner of the railway carriage with j a map in his hand. “You remember this line!-’'’ said one of us to the man in the corner. "Do I'” be answered with a laugh. “When I. tell you that I haven’t been ibis way'for twenty years you’ll know that I’m pretty rusty in details of the landscape. All the same, I’ve got a good map here, and perhaps I can read it well enough to describe in advance what we shall see as we go along. Shall 1 try?” We said lie might. “Well, we are now at the beginning iof a long cutting which, I think, because of its strength, may lie very deep in the middle. Then we come o«t into a narrow, winding valley. The valley widens on our left, and as we cross

it on a high embankment we look out once again into the vale which we are leaving now. “Wo go over two brandies of n stream as we run across the embankment. They divide about a hundred , yards away on our right. There is a mill there with a big pond behind it. "Wln'ii we have crossed the stream we come upon a broad main road. V cross it at a high level, and it will look very far below us. -lust where we cross there is a house, probably an inn, on the light. We shall get a bird’s-eye view of its roof as we pass. ■We shall then he on the lar sale ul the valley. The line will turn to the right through a short cutting and go up the valley, hugging the hillside all the way. We shall have steep slopes and rocky faces overhanging us on the left, except here and there where a little deep-cut combe gives a ]ieep sharply upwards to the heathlands that crown the hills.

"We shall go very slowly and hear the engine labouring heavily, lor the line takes a long hank here. And the road and l-ln 1 stream will tall e\ci farther below us. Three miles on we shall see a big village clustered down in the valley bottom, with a road winding up towards the station through which we shall pass. 'I hen comes a wood, stretching on either side of the line, and we turn left and lose sight of the valley. "And shall wo see the sea after that?” a little girl among us asked eagerly. He promised her that wo should alien we were past the little fishing port at the mouth of the estuary.

The way proved almost exactly as lie described it, except that some ol the woods had gone, leaving only dead, grev ground. Sometimes we borrowed the map from him and retraced our way and saw Imw recognisable on the map wa- everything that we half passed. Rut ti,. had tead the cptintr.vsiilc from the map. and not the map Iroin the (emitiyside-—and that, perhaps was harder. Still, a good map, if you know how to study it, does enable you to visualise very dearly country you have never soon.

And here is a good game for everyone who travels on a line lie does not know. . . . Let him look up the way on the map beforehand, and then, as he speeds along in the train, test by what he sees his reading of the map.