week, and two the next. They have a good garden, and gave us a capital
feed of potatoes and peas, both fried together, an excellent
combination. Their culinary apparatus and plates, cups, knives, and
forks, are very limited in number. The men are all gentlemen and sons
of gentlemen, and one of them is a Cambridge man, who took a high
second-class a year or two before my time. Every now and then he leaves
his up-country avocations, and becomes a great gun at the college in
Christ Church, examining the boys; he then returns to his shepherding,
cooking, bullock-driving, etc. etc., as the case may be. I am informed
that the having faithfully learned the ingenuous arts, has so far
mollified his morals that he is an exceedingly humane and judicious
bullock-driver. He regarded me as a somewhat despicable new-comer (at
least so I imagined), and when next morning I asked where I should wash,
he gave rather a French shrug of the shoulders, and said, "The lake." I
felt the rebuke to be well merited, and that with the lake in front of
the house, I should have been at no loss for the means of performing my
ablutions. So I retired abashed and cleansed myself therein. Under his
bed I found Tennyson's Idylls of the King. So you will see that even in
these out-of-the-world places people do care a little for something
besides sheep. I was told an amusing story of an Oxford man shepherding
down in Otago. Someone came into his hut, and, taking up a book, found
it in a strange tongue, and enquired what it was. The Oxonian (who was
baking at the time) answered that it was Machiavellian discourses upon
the first decade of Livy. The wonder-stricken visitor laid down the
book and took up another, which was, at any rate, written in English.
This he found to be Bishop Butler's Analogy. Putting it down speedily
as something not in his line, he laid hands upon a third. This proved
to be Patrum Apostolicorum Opera, on which he saddled his horse and went
right away, leaving the Oxonian to his baking. This man must certainly
be considered a rare exception. New Zealand seems far better adapted to