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