ns next
session."

"Better get your estimates through first, old fellow. The bagpipes will
play quite loud enough over them to last for some time."

"I know it, but tremble not," replied the undaunted Secretary; "I have
got used to it. I fancy I hear Callaghan beginning now: 'The unbridled
prodigality, sir, and the reckless profligacy, sir, of those
individuals who have so long, under the name of government----'"

"That'll do, now," said the Captain; "you are worse than the reality. I
shall go ashore, and take my chance of getting breakfast. Will you
come?"

"Not if I know it, sir, with pork chops for breakfast in the cabin.
Blockstrop, have you duly reflected what you are about to do? You are
about to land alone, unarmed, unprovisioned, among the offscourings of
white society, scarcely superior in their habits of life to the nomadic
savages they have unjustly displaced. Pause and reflect, my dear
fellow. What guarantee have you that they will not propose to feed you
on damper, or some other nameless abomination of the same sort?"

"It was only the other day, in the House," said the Captain, "that you
said the small squatters and freehold farmers represented the greater
part of the intelligence and education of the colony, and now----"

"Sir! sir!" said the Secretary, "you don't know what you are talking
about. Sir, we are not in the House now. Are you determined, then?"

The Captain was quite determined, and they went down to the waist. They
were raising a bag of potatoes from somewhere, and the Colonial
Secretary, seizing two handfuls of them, presented them to the Captain.

"If you will go," he said, "take these with you, and teach the poor
benighted white savages to plant them. So if you fall a victim to
indigestion, we will vote a monument to you on the summit of the Cape,
and write:--'He did not live in vain. He introduced the potato among
the small cattle stations around Cape Chatham.'"

He held out his potatoes towards the retiring Captain with the air of
Burke producing the dagger. His humour, I perceive, reads poor enough
when written down, but when assisted by his comical impassible face,
and solemn drawling delivery, I never heard anything much better.

Good old Pollifex! my heart warms towards him now. When I think what
the men were whose clamour put him out of office in 184-, I have the
conviction forced upon me, that the best among them was not worth his
little finger. He left the colony in a m