lass family and commercial hotel of the old
country. There is a long bar or saloon occupying the ground floor, with
a parlour behind it; there are also a spacious dining-room and
business-room. Upstairs there is a billiard-room, smoking-room, ladies'
drawing-room, and bedrooms capable of accommodating thirty or forty
guests. Behind the house is a large courtyard, round which are ranged
the bath-rooms, kitchens, offices, and stables; while further back is
the garden, principally used for strictly utilitarian purposes.

According to colonial custom there is little or no privacy, no private
sitting-rooms, and if a visitor have a bedroom to himself, it is not
quite such a sanctum as it would be in Britain. People stopping in the
house are free to permeate it from kitchen to attic, if so minded.

There are three common meals--breakfast, luncheon-dinner, and
dinner-supper--and any one who is not present at them, or who is hungry
between times, will have to go without in the interval, and wait till
the next regular meal-time comes round, unless he dare to invade the
kitchen and curry favour with the cook, or goes down to some restaurant
in the city.

Generally speaking, the table is furnished in a style most creditable as
to both quantity and quality of the viands. There may not be such a show
of plate and glass and ornament as there would be at a London hotel of
similar status, but there is a plenteous profusion of varied eatables,
fairly cooked and served up, to which profusion the home establishment
is an utter stranger. Fish, fowl, butcher's meat, vegetables, breads and
cakes, eggs, cream, and fruit, appear in such abundance that, when every
one is nearly gorged, we wonder what can possibly be done with the
overplus, especially since we are told that this is a city without
paupers, as yet.

Fresh from the crystallized decorum of English manners, we are
necessarily struck by the freedom of intercourse that prevails. Class
prejudices have certainly been imported here from Europe, and exist to a
small extent in Auckland society, but there is, withal, a nearer
approach to true liberty, equality, and fraternity, at any rate in the
manners and customs of colonists. The hotel servants show no symptoms of
servility, though in civility they are not lacking. Every one is
perfectly independent, and considers himself or herself on an equal
footing with every one else, no matter what differences may exist in
their present position-