The scent of horse dung filled the fetid air, cabs rattled, and vans jolted on the stones, and the dead horse, bloody and mud-stained, formed, as it were, a sort of island, parting the traffic into separate streams, as it surged onward roaring in the current of the streets.
A PAKEHA
Rain, rain, and more rain, dripping off the sodden trees, soaking the fields, and blotting out the landscape as with a neutral-tinted gauze. The sort of day that we in the land “dove il doce Dorico risuona” designate as “saft.” Enter along the road to me a neighbour of some fifty to sixty years of age, one Mr. Campbell, a little bent, hair faded rather than grey, frosty-faced as we Scotsmen are apt to turn after some half a century of weather, but still a glint of red showing in the cheeks; moustache and whiskers trimmed in the fashion of the later sixties; “tacketed” boots, and clothes, if not impervious to the rain, as little affected by it as is the bark of trees. His hat, once black and of the pattern affected at one time by all Free Church clergymen, now greenish and coal-scuttled fore and aft and at the sides. In his red, chapped, dirty, but grey-mittened hands a shepherd’s stick—long, crooked, and made of hazel-wood.
“It’ll maybe tak’ up, laird.”
“Perhaps.”
“An awfu’ spell o’ it.”
“Yes, disgusting.”
“Aye, laird, the climate’s sort o’ seekenin’. I mind when I was in New Zealand in the sixties, aye, wi’ a surveyor, just at the triangulation, ye ken. Man, a grand life, same as the tinklers, here to-day and gane to-morrow, like old Heather Jock. Hoot, never mind your dog, laird, there’s just McClimant’s sheep, puir silly body, I ken his keel-mark. Losh me, a bonny country, just a pairfect pairadise, New Zealand. When I first mind Dunedin it wasna bigger than the clachan there, out by. A braw place noo, I understan’, and a’ the folk fearfu’ took up wi’ horse, driving their four-in-hands, blood cattle, every one of them. There’s men to-day like Jacky Price—he was a Welshmen, I’m thinking—who I mind doing their day’s darg just like mysel’ aboot Dunedin, and noo they send their sons hame to be educated up aboot England.
“When? ’Oo aye, I went oot in the old London wi’ Captin Macpherson. He’d bin the round trip a matter o’ fifteen times, forbye a wee bit jaunt whiles after the ‘blackbirds’ (slaves, ye ken, what we called free endentured labourers) to the New Hebrides. The London, aye, ’oo aye, she foundered in the Bay (Biscay, ye ken) on her return. It’s just a special providence I wasna a passenger myself.
“Why did I leave the country? Eh, laird, ye may say. I would hae made my hame out there, but it was just the old folks threap, threaping on me to come back, I’m telling ye. A bonny toon, Dunedin, biggit on a wee hill just for a’ the wurrld like Gartfarran there, and round the point a wee bit plain just like the Carse o’ Stirling. Four year I wrocht at the surveyin’, maistly triangulation, syne twa at shepherdin’, nane o’ your Australlian fashion tailing them a’ day, but on the hame system gaen’ aboot; man, I mind whiles I didna see anither man in sax weeks’ time.”