CHAPTER XI
AN INTERLUDE
“A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of plain mutton with turnips, and have no leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and institution of eating; when he shall confess a perturbation of mind, inconsistent with the purposes of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle.”—Charles Lamb.
On January the 31st we went down to the hut, photographing on the way. Next day Fyfe had to go over the Ball Pass with a Government official from Wellington, and Hodgkins returned down the Tasman Valley to the Hermitage, leaving my wife and me alone in the hut. Bad weather came on, and one night a howling nor’-wester, accompanied by heavy rain and the crashing of thunder, shook the hut till we feared for its safety. Then it cleared, and one fine day two sun-bonneted young ladies—the Misses Williams, of Wellington—came up from the Hermitage with Fyfe. A relative of the late Lord Randolph Churchill—a geologist and a traveller—also made his appearance, and we showed him round. He was charmed with the surroundings, and intensely interested in the keas, who happened to be in rare form. Then we had more bad weather, and were all cooped up in the hut for two or three days. But these days were among the jolliest we had ever spent in camp. The old tin hut rang with laughter till far into the night.
The Sun-bonnet Brigade.
On The Upper Tasman.
When first we saw those two sun-bonnets looming large above two immaculate blouses invading our domain, we were not at all assured as to how we, with our rough-and-ready camp ways, would get on with them. The owners of the sun-bonnets, however, proved to be real sports, and all went merry as a marriage bell. Camp is just about the best place possible for ascertaining, in a minimum space of time, the character of a man or of a woman, and the Ball hut in those pre-luxurious days was especially a test. We had been mates with some queer characters under that tin roof. There were times when the milk of human kindness had to take the place of tinned milk, and when a man pretended that he was not hungry in order that his mate might get a bigger helping. There were other times—of rare occurrence luckily—when selfishness got the upper hand, and one had to trust one’s indignation in the keeping of a grim silence. But of all the parties with whom we had camped there, never had we seen a jollier nor a more kindly one than that which met around the rickety old deal table in the first days of February 1897.