NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1390, 24 April 1915, Page 4

NEWS AND NOTES.

The Maoris have surprised the average American visitors by their excellent and fluent English (states the San Francisco correspondent of the Auckland Star). On one occasion a dozen American ladies, chatting with the Maori women dancers, were surprised beyond measure with the manner in which they discoursed in F.uglish. "How long have you been in America?” asked one American lady. “Only a month," came the reply. “Well, you speak wonderful English, and must have picked it up very quickly in those four weeks,” retorted the American. It was then that the Maori woman unfolded the fact that English was the language of New Zealand, and that they had received an education equally as good as their white-skinned American sisters.

“One of the war novelties in England," said an officer of the steamer Beltana, which arrived in Sydney from London Inst week, “ is the presence of week-ending soldiers from the front. In London there were hundreds of them in the streets. They showed plainly the strain of the campaign, but it was wonderful how the short holiday bucked them up. They are the idols of the people, but their memories are too steru to allow them to be spoilt. Nothing could bring the war home to the people more than the fact that soldiers from the trenches in the fighting line can spend week-ends in England. “ Every man of them," he added, “ admits that it is almost impossible to exaggerate the severity of the campaign, but there was no one who was reluctant to fulfil his duty and return to the trenches after a taste of feather beds, and the comforts of domestic conditions at home.” Kitchener’s army he declared, was a splendid body of men. It had been estimated by responsible persons that 3,000,000 men had been enrolled, and the result was that now it was almost the exception and not the rule to find men in civilian clothes in the streets.