HOSPITAL CHAT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1880, 21 September 1918, Page 1

HOSPITAL CHAT.

"DRAWING THE LONG BOW.”

WHAT THE MAORI SAID

(Christehureh Press Correspondent.)

London, July Hi

Some time ago I showed what excellent apostles for New Zealand are the thousands' of our men who have passed through English hospitals and made English friends from end to end of the Kingdom. One only hopes (hat some of the pictures they have painted of their native land may not sink too deeply into the souls of their hearers. There is the case of the hoy the other day who was discussing very tenderly with his English fianceethe relative merits of settling down in England instead of going hack to New Zealand. It was quite impossible, he said, for he had his property, in God’s Own Country, and must go back. “But couldn’t we take a small farm here?” she pleaded. “Oh, no, it would never do.” said the trooper. “You see, mine is a walking slick farm, and (he sun in England is not hot enough to turn the handles.” A member of such a respectable regiment as the Otagos was being earnestly interrogated by a lady visitor about his home country, and so on. “Are you married?” she asked. The Otago man looked sadly at the ceiling and declared himself a widower. This produce;! immediate sympathy and further questions. “You see,” he said, “ft’s Ibis way. They gel trench feet very badly in New Zealand, and when wives get trench feet there’s nothing for il but to shoot them. I shot mine just before we came away.” The hardships of “colonial” life were made very graphic by an Auckland member of the Rifle Brigade to a fair visitor. Many people in New Zealand, he said, do not wear boots at all.

“Of course, they start out with boots on, but in walking from one goldfield to another they wear them right off their feet. Gradually a hard crust forms on the bottom of the foot with the constant walking, and finally instead of getting more boots, they get shoes nailed on to the pard. More than half the people of Now Zealand wear these horseshoes.”

But the palm goes to Private Piripi, of the Maori Battalion. A dear old lady sat at his bedside cheering his Sunday afternoon. “You speak very good English,” she was say-

Piripi blushed at the compliment, but rose at once.

“Yes,” he said, “it isn’t bad, and I have learned it all since I came to England.”

“Really?”

“It is quite true,” said Piripi. “1 have only been tamed a short time ago. My father is still wild. He had never been tamed.” “How wonderful. Where does he live?”

“He is still in the bush,” replied Piripi, unabashed. “They tried to catch him to say good-bye before I left, but they could not get him.”

The old lady’s eyes were tilled with wonder. “Whatever does he live on?”

“Oh, anything he can shoot — goats and calves, and sometimes ha hies!”