It will be readily understood that our table equipage is not of the best or most sumptuous description. It fluctuates in extent a good deal from time to time, and always presents the spectacle of pleasing variety. We are never without appliances and substitutes of one kind or other; and members of the society now and then add to the stock such items as they severally deem desirable, or happen to pick up cheap "down the river."
Experience has taught us that meat is meat still, although it may be eaten direct out of frying-pan or stew-pot. It is just as good, better we think, as when served up on Palissy ware or silver. Knives and forks are distinctly a product of civilization; custom holds us to the use of them. But what are a sheath-knife and a wooden skewer, if not everything that is needed?
Those ultra-conservatives among our number, those rigid adherents to the most primitive bush-life, of course despise all the refinements of the table. Plates, forks, and spoons are to them degeneracies,—things that no noble bushman needs or requires. They scorn any leanings towards luxury and ease. Give them a life that is totally free from the petty trammels and slavish conventionalities of the old world!
At one time we were possessed of but a single plate, an iron one, which had lost its enamel, and was half eaten through by rust; we had only one fork, and that had only a prong and a half remaining. But we had our cooking-pots and billies, our sheath-knives, wooden skewers, fingers, and O'Gaygun's shingle-plates. What more could any one want? And if there were not enough pannikins or mugs to hold our tea all round, there were empty preserve-cans, gallipots, and oyster-shells! We were content and happy. But this blissful state was to be rudely broken.
One day, a member of our party had been down Helensville way. There had been an auction of the effects of a settler, who was moving off to the South Island. Our chum had not been able to resist the temptation, and had invested all he was worth in an assortment of goods. It was night when he returned, and we were all in the shanty. He came up from the boat, staggering under the weight of a great kit full of crocks and such-like.
Of course, the excitement was great as we surveyed the heap of new treasures we had acquired. Even O'Gaygun was enchanted for a moment, till he remembered himself, and assumed the stern and savage bearing befitting the leader of our conservatives. His scorn was withering.
"F'what might this be?" he would ask, fingering contemptuously first one thing and then another.
"An' f'what do ye do wid it, at all?" he inquired, as article after article was reviewed, affecting the airs of wonderment supposed to belong to a child of nature.
Presently his humour changed, and he passed into the declamatory stage.
"'Tis a sinful exthravagance! a temptin' av Providence!" he exclaimed. "Plates! an' faaks! an' dishes! an' sacers! did ivver anny wan see the loike? F'what do ye expict nixt? Kid gloves to work in, maybe! That ivver I'd see the day whan sich degrading emblems av the ould superstitions of sassiety was brought into the bush! Ough!"