what reply the lady had given to her lord’s request; I thought that it would depend very much on her age and nationality.
“Well, she was Scotch,” answered Newman, “and as he was an old fellow who had been fossiking about out here for some time before he was able to afford even a tent, I suppose that she was not very young either. And her reply was: “Do ye think I’m going to travel a matter o’ fifteen thousand miles across the water to live in a cloot-haese?”
Next we passed a hill-side torn open and mutilated; a little later a tract of barren, fire-destroyed country where ugliness and desolation had taken the place of the lovely woodland; then a wrecked dredge in the river, beyond it a water-race that Newman said represented years of patient toil, expended often on the mere chance of profitable workings, and a little farther on a dredge at work,—every few miles something that pointed to recent occupation if not to present, but there is very little gold-working going on outside the mining towns now.
We passed the town of Murchison in the distance, and went right through Lyell, a hamlet built above a river on the steep sides of a hill, its single street cut out of the hill itself. Like every other village in New Zealand it swarmed with children, though, like Murchison, it is solely a gold-mining camp where one would scarcely have expected to find many women. But Lyell, insignificant as it appeared to us, has a newspaper of its own.
We crossed dozens of bridges during the day, over creeks and rivers,—wooden bridges on wooden piles, most of them looking far too fragile for the weight of a heavily laden coach. And besides these we forded a number of streams, each one affording me a little thrill of anticipation, for as we approached, a Colonial lady sitting on the seat above and behind us. invariably leaned forward to look, and exclaimed nervously:
“That's the part I don't like!”
Scenting a tale of adventure I was anxious to ask her why she so disliked crossing these small and apparently innocent streamlets, but Mrs Greendays, wrapped up in conventionality and an ingrained horror of speaking to fellow-travellers, frowned on the suggestion. And so a probably enthralling tale of wild adventure was lost to the world.
We were allowed time for luncheon at the Inangahua Junction Hotel, just above the meeting of the Buller and Inangahua Rivers, a house whose sole claim to respect lies in the number of syllables in its name. Two other coaches, one from Reefton, the other from Westport, had arrived before us, and their passengers, like a cloud of locusts, had left little behind them. And those few remnants were cold. Our hopes revived at the sight of a tray of hot scones, but alas! they were “sad” and the butter was bad,—a thing so rare in New Zealand that it seemed wholly iniquitous. Fortunately we had a small supply of chocolate and some apples with us, so that the ravenous appetites born of long hours in the fresh, sweet air did not go entirely unappeased.
