Station Amusements in New Zealand - Lady Mary Anne Barker (romantic novels in english .txt) 📗

they would look upon it as impertinence if you suggested they should come to church." "You will find a few may come just at first, and then when the novelty wears off and they have seen all the pretty things in your drawing room, not a soul will ever come near the place."

"If even the men don't say something very free and easy to you when you invite them to your house on Sunday afternoons, you may depend upon it that after two or three weeks you will not know how to keep them in order."

Such, and many more, were the discouraging remarks made when I consulted my neighbours about my plan for collecting the shepherds from the surrounding runs, and holding a Church of England Service every Sunday afternoon at our own little homestead. To my mind, the distances seemed the greatest obstacle, as many of the men I wanted to reach lived twenty-five or even thirty miles away, with very rough country between. I had no fear of impertinence, for it is unknown to me, and seldom comes, I fancy, unprovoked; whilst with regard to the novelty wearing off and the men ceasing to attend, that must be left in God's hands. We could only endeavour to plant the good seed, and trust to Him to give the increase. It was a great comfort to me in those early days that F----, who had been many years in the colony, never joined in the disheartening prophecies I have alluded to. Although as naturally averse to reading aloud before strangers as a man who had lived a solitary life would be sure to be, he promised at once, with a good grace, to read the Evening Service and a sermon afterwards, and thus smoothed one difficulty over directly. His advice to me was precisely what I would fain repeat: "Try, by all means: if you fail you will at least feel you have made the attempt." May all who try succeed, as we did! I believe firmly they will, for it is an undertaking on which God's blessing is sure to rest, and there are no such fertilizing dews as those which fall from heaven. The mists arising from earth are only miasmic vapours after all!

But I fear to linger too long on the end, instead of telling you about the means.

It was May when we were fairly settled in our new home at the head of a hill-encircled valley. With us that month answers to your November, but fogs are unknown in that breezy Middle Island, and my first winter in Canterbury was a beautiful season, heralded in by an exquisite autumn. How crisp the mornings and evenings were, with ever so light a film of hoar frost, making a splendid sparkle on every blade of waving tussock-grass! Then in the middle of the day the delicious warmth of the sun tempted one to linger all day in the open air, and I never wearied of gazing at the strange purple shadows cast by a passing cloud; or up, beyond the floating vapourous wreath, to the heaven of brilliant blue which smiled upon us. And yet, when I come to think of it, I don't know that I had much time to spare for glancing at either hills or skies, for we were just settling ourselves in a new place, and no one knows what _that_ means unless they have tried it, fifty miles away from the nearest shop. The yeast alone was a perpetual anxiety to me,--it would not keep beyond a certain time, and had a tendency to explode its confining bottles in the middle of the night, so it became necessary to make it in smaller quantities every ten days or so. If by any chance I forgot to remind my scatter-brained damsels to replenish the yeast bottles, they used up the last drop, and then would come smilingly to me with the remark, "There aint not a drop o' yeast, about, anywhere, mum." This entailed flap-jacks, or scones, or soda bread, or some indigestible compound for at least three days, as it was of no use attempting to make proper bread until the yeast had worked. Then the well needed to be deepened, a kitchen garden had to be made, shelter to be provided for the fowls and pigs; a shed to be put up for coals; a thousand things which entailed thought and trouble, had to be done.

It is true these rough jobs were not exactly in my line, but indoors I was just as busy trying to make big things fit into little spaces and _vice versa_. We could not afford to take things coolly and do a little every day, for at that time of year an hour's change in the wind might have brought a heavy fall of snow, or a sharp frost, or a; deluge of rain down upon the uncovered and defenceless heads of our live stock. The poor dear sheep, the source of our income, were after all the least well-cared for creatures on the Station. A well grassed and watered run, with sunny vallies for winter feeding, and green hills for summer pasturage, had been provided by antipodean Nature for them, and to these advantages we only added some twenty or twenty-five miles of wire fencing, and then they were left to themselves, with a couple of shepherds to look after fifteen thousand sheep all the year round.

But yet, busy as we were, we found time to look up a congregation. The very first Sunday afternoon, whilst we were still in the midst of a chaos of chips and big boxes and straw and empty china-barrels, our own shepherds came over, by invitation, and the only very near neighbours we had--a Scotch head-shepherd and his charming young wife,--and we held a Service in the half-furnished drawing room. After it was ended we had a long talk with the men, and they confessed that they had enjoyed it very much, and would like to come regularly. When questioned as to the feasibility of inducing others to join, they said that it might be suggested to more than one distant, lonely hill-shepherd, but his uncontrollable shyness would probably prevent his attendance.

"Jim Salter, and Joe Bennett, and a lot more on 'em, would be glad enow to come, if so be they could feel as how they was truly wellcombe," said our shepherd, Pepper, who prided himself on the elegance and correctness of his phraseology. He added, after a reflective pause, turning bashfully away, "If so be as the lady would just look round and give 'em a call, they'd be to be persuaded belike."

So the scheme was Pepper's after all, you see. But this "looking round," to which he alluded so airily, meant scrambling rides, varying from ten to twenty-eight miles in length, over break-neck country, and this on the slender chance of finding the men in-doors. Now a New Zealand shepherd almost lives out on the hills, so the prospect of finding any of our congregation at home was slight indeed. However, as I said before, F---- stood by me, and although we neither of us could well spare the time, we agreed to devote two afternoons every week, so long as the fine open autumn weather, lasted, to making excursions in search of back-country huts. There are no roads or finger posts or guides of any sort in those distant places. When we inquired what was the name of "Mills" shepherd (the masters are always plain Smith or Jones, and the shepherds Mr.----, in the colonies) the answer was generally very vague. "Wiry Bill, we mostly calls 'im; but I think I've heerd say his rightful name was Mr. Pellet, mum. He's a little chap, as strong as the 'ouse," explained Pepper, who was an incorrigible cockney, "and he lives over there," pointing with his thumb to a mountain range behind us. "He's in one of them blind gullies. You go along the gorge of the river till you come to a saddle all over fern, and you drop down that, and follow the best o' three or four tracts till you come to a swamp."

Here Pepper paused, in consideration of my face of horror; for if there was one thing I dreaded more than another in those early days, it was a swamp. Steep hill sides, wide creeks, honey-combed flats, all came in, the day's ride,--but a swamp! Ugh! the horrible treacherous thing, so green and innocent looking, with here and there a quicksand or a peaty morass, in which, without a moment's warning, your horse sank up to his withers! It was dreadful, and when we came to such a place Helen used to stop dead short, prick her pretty ears well forward, and, trembling with fear and excitement, put her nose close to the ground, smelling every inch, before she would place her fore foot down on it, jumping off it like a goat if it proved insecure. Generally she crossed a swamp, by a series of bounds in and out of flax bushes; and hopeless indeed would a morass be without those green cities of refuge!

Horrible as a large swamp is however to a timid horsewoman, it is dear to the heart of a cockatoo. He gladly buys a freehold of fifty acres in the midst of one, burns it, makes a sod fence, sown with gorse seed a-top, all round his section, drains it in a rough and ready fashion, and then the splendid fertile soil which has been waiting for so many thousand years, "brings forth fruit abundantly." Such enormous fields of wheat and oats and barley as you come upon sometimes,--with, alas, never a market near enough to enable the plenteous crop to return sevenfold into its master's bosom!

I shall not inflict upon you a description of all our rides in search of members for our congregation. Two, in widely differing directions, will serve as specimens of such excursions. In consideration of my new-chumishness, F---- selected a comparatively easy track for our first ride. And yet, "bad was the best," might surely be said of that breakneck path. What would an English horse, or an English lady say, to riding for miles over a slippery winding ledge on a rocky hill side, where a wall of solid mountain rose up perpendicularly on the right hand, and on the left a very respectable sized river hurried over its boulders far beneath the aerial path; yet this was comparatively a safe track, and presented but one serious obstacle, over which I was ruthlessly taken. It is perhaps needless to say we were riding in single file, and equally unnecessary to state that I was the last; for certainly we should never have made much progress otherwise. Helen, my bay mare, would follow her stable companion, on which F---- was mounted, so that was the way we got on at all.

A sudden sharp turn showed me what appeared to be a low stone wall running own the spur of the mountain, right across our track, and I had already begun to disquiet myself about the possibility of turning back on such a narrow ledge, when I saw F----'s powerful black horse, with his ears well forward, and his reins, lying loose on his neck, make a sort of rush at the obstacle, climb up it as a cat would, stand for an instant, exactly like a performing goat, with all four legs drawn closely together under him, and then with a spring disappear on the other side. "This wall", I thought, "must be but loosely built, for _Leo_ has displaced some of the stones from its coping." Helen, pretty dear, hurried after her friend and leader; and before I had time to realize what she was going to