One night we were visited by a severe thunderstorm, and the rain fell in torrents. But we made merry inside the hut, and, after a supper of boiled fish and potatoes, held a grand concert. “Friday,” with a Maori song, some parts of which, I am afraid, would not bear translation, was the hero of the evening. Even “Billy Barlow” would have had to play second fiddle to our man Friday. I can still see his expressive dark features and his expansive grin, revealing a set of beautiful pearly teeth, and hear, in imagination, the strange songs that were sung. I can see again young Foster, and Head, and Wick, and the Maori, and a quiet old Scotsman sitting round the big log fire that went roaring up the capacious chimney, all keeping time with their feet as they drawled out a melancholy chorus to each verse of an interminably long love-song:—
“I’ll take you home, Kathleen,
Across the ocean blue and wide;
To where your heart has ever been,
Since first you were my bonnie bride.”
Kathleen was evidently an exile in a strange land, and, apparently, could not get used to her new surroundings.
Fine, bronzed, broad-chested fellows the singers were, leading a healthy, happy life in these western wilds, and I shall never forget their kindness to the lonely pilgrim who had chanced within their domain.
My leg mended slowly, but I spent the time in delightful idleness, by day fishing for flounders and mullet, and by night mainly occupied in hunting—the quarry being that diminutive species of chamois so humorously described by my old friend and fellow-traveller, Mark Twain. But the more one slaughtered the more there seemed to be. No sooner had you killed one than you found a hundred prepared to come to his funeral!
At last the time came for me to turn my face again towards the mountains, for I knew my wife, who was waiting at the Hermitage, on the other side of the great mountain chain, would be getting anxious about my non-arrival. So one fine morning Dick Fiddian and I got horses and rode to Scott’s Homestead, situated on a little island between the forks of the Karangarua River. We were warmly welcomed and pressed to stay the night, but I decided to hurry on. Here I purchased two loaves of bread, four dozen hard-boiled eggs, some bacon, cheese, tea, sugar, and butter for my journey. The butter, unfortunately, owing to the heat, melted and ran out of the tin in which it was enclosed into the blanket in my sleeping bag. It was not at all pleasant getting into a buttered sleeping bag, and I would much rather have had the said butter on my bread than on my bed. However, there was no use crying over spilt milk, or spilt butter, and we ate our dry bread with a good grace, that atoned, in a measure, for the absence of the butter.
We camped the first night under an overhanging rock near Architect Creek, several miles up the Copland, which is the right-hand branch of the Karangarua River. My companion was an excellent bushman and a good hand with a swag.