too late in the
year for fruit, but Salter's currant, raspberry, and gooseberry bushes
gave us a good idea of how well he must have fared in the summer. The
fowls were just devouring the last of the green-pea shoots, and the
potatoes had been blackened by our first frosts.

It was all very nice and trim and comfortable, except the loneliness;
that must have been simply awful. It is difficult to realise how
completely cut off from the society of his kind a New Zealand up-country
shepherd is, especially at an out-station like this. Once in every three
months he goes down to the homestead, borrows the pack horse, and leads
it up to his hut, with a quarter's rations of flour, tea, sugar and
salt; of course he provides himself with mutton and firewood, and his
simple wants are thus supplied. After shearing, about January, his wages
are paid, varying from 75 pounds to 100 pounds a year, according to
the locality, and then he gets a week's leave to go down to the nearest
town. If he be a prudent steady man, as our friend Salter was, he puts
his money in the bank, or lends it out on a freehold mortgage at ten
per cent., only deducting a few pounds from his capital for a suit of
clothes, a couple of pair of Cookham boots for hill walking, and above
all, some new books.

Without any exception, the shepherds I came across in New Zealand were
all passionately fond of reading; and they were also well-informed
men, who often expressed themselves in excellent, through superfine,
language. Their libraries chiefly consisted of yellow-covered novels,
and out of my visits in search of a congregation grew a scheme for a
book-club to supply something better in the way of literature, which was
afterwards most successfully carried out. But of this I need not speak
here, for we are still seated inside Salter's hut,--so small in its
dimensions that it could hardly have held another guest. Womanlike,
my eyes were everywhere, and I presently spied out an empty bottle,
labelled "Worcestershire Sauce."

"Dear me, Salter," I cried, "I had no idea you were so grand as to
have sauces up here: why we hardly ever use them." "Well, mum," replied
Salter, bashfully, and stroking his long black beard to gain time
to select the grandest words he could think of, "it is hardly to be
regarded in the light of happetite, that there bottle, it is more in
the nature of remedies." Then, seeing that I still looked mystified, he
added, "You see, mum, although we ge