to adjourn to the clearing, where they had built a rough log hut for
temporary shelter, and have our dinner. They had provided themselves
with some bacon; but were very glad to accept of F----'s offer of
mutton, to be had for the trouble of fetching it. When we reached
the little shanty, Trew produced some capital bread, he had baked the
evening before in a camp-oven; F----'s pockets were emptied of their
load of potatoes, which were put to roast in the wood embers; rashers of
bacon and mutton chops spluttered and fizzed side-by-side on a monster
gridiron with tall feet, so as to allow it to stand by itself over the
clear fire, and we turned our chops from time to time by means of a fork
extemporized out of a pronged stick.

Over another fire, a little way to leeward, hung the bushmen's kettle on
an iron tripod, and, so soon as it boiled, my little teapot was filled
before Domville threw in his great fist-full of tea. I had brought a
tiny phial of cream in the pocket of my saddle, but the men thought it
spoiled the flavour of the tea, which they always drink "_neat_,"
as they call it. The Temperance Society could draw many interesting
statistics from the amount of hard work which is done in New Zealand on
tea. Now, I am sorry to say, beer is creeping up to the stations, and is
served out at shearing time and so on; but in the old days all the hard
work used to be done on tea, and tea alone, the men always declaring
they worked far better on it than on beer. "When we have as much good
bread and mutton as we can eat," they would say, "we don't feel to miss
the beer we used to drink in England;" and at the end of a year or
two of tea and water-drinking, their bright eyes and splendid physical
condition showed plainly enough which was the best kind of beverage to
work, and work hard too, upon.

So there we sat round the fire: F---- with the men, and I, a little way
off, out of the smoke, with the dogs. Overhead, the sunlight streamed
down on the grass which had sprung up, as it always does in a clearing;
the rustle among the lofty tree tops made a delicious murmur high up in
the air; a waft of cool breeze flitted past us laden with the scent
of newly-cut wood (and who does not know that nice, _clean_ perfume?);
innumerable paroquets almost brushed us with their emerald-green wings,
whilst the tamer robin or the dingy but melodious bell-bird came near
to watch the intruders. The sweet clear whistle of the tui or
parson-bi