Towards afternoon the captain of the Sarah Ann came on board, after concluding his business with the agents.
“Good luck to you, Murray; make sail, and let’s be off, for I sha’n’t feel as if the old Sally is safe till we’ve left this beautiful spot a hundred knots astern. The poor skipper of that schooner’s ashore there, and he’s half mad, and no wonder.”
The captain made his way below, the anchor was weighed, sail after sail dropped down, and then, with a pleasant breeze astern, the old barque slowly began to force her way through the bright and transparent waters, making the sunlit windows of Port Caroline grow more and more distant, while Edward Murray’s heart gladdened within him, as he thought of the prolonged stay for discharging and loading that would be made in Kaitaka Bay, New Zealand.
Story 3--Chapter III.
Golden Gap.
“‘And I said, if there’s peace in this world to be found’—Go on, Joey, will you?—‘The—he heart that is humble might welcome it here,’” sang and said a sturdy-looking, hard-faced man, with cleanly-shaven chin and upper lip, and a pair of well-trimmed grizzly whiskers. He was somewhat sun-browned, but wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, and in addition, as he strode a very weedy, meditative-looking pony, he carried up a large gingham umbrella.
“Well, Joey!” he continued, apostrophising the pony, which had come to a full stop; “you’re a sensible beast, and it is a beautiful spot, and ‘the heart that is humble’ might truly ‘welcome it here.’ What a paradise! They may well call it Golden Gap! Golden, indeed! A heavenly gilding—no dross here! No more like Battersea Fields than I’m like an archangel. Well, Joey, suppose we meditate, then, for half an hour. You shall chew your herb, and I’ll smoke mine, even if it be not canonical. I don’t like good things to be wasted, as my old mother used to say. Savages smoke, so why should not a parson?”
Slowly dismounting, he closed his umbrella, unbuckled the pony’s bridle, that he might graze, and then, seating himself beneath a huge tree-fern, he filled and lit his pipe, and began to enjoy its fragrance.
For he was seated far up on the side of a mountain, whose exact similitude was on the other side of the valley, so that it seemed as if, in some wild convulsion, Nature had divided one vast eminence, and then clothed the jagged and rugged sides from the point where the glittering, snow-tipped summits peered forth, down to the lovely stream in the valley, with the riches of her wondrous arboretum. The fattest of pastures by the little river, and deepest of arable rich soil; and then, as step by step the mountain rose, everywhere shone forth the glory of the New Zealand foliage, with its fern and palm-like fronds, parasite and creeper, of the most golden greens, and here and there blushing with blossom; while in scores of places tiny silver threads could be seen dashing, plashing, and flashing in the sun-rays, as they descended from the never-exhausted storehouses of ice and snow far above, which glowed in turn, like some wondrous collection of gold and gems.