Little By
Little, Night And Heavy Rain Came On, And Right Glad Were We When We Saw
The Twinkling Light
On the terrace where the hut was, and were thus
assured that the Irishman, who had been left alone and
Without meat for
the last ten days, was still in the land of the living. Two or three
coo-eys soon made him aware that we were coming, and I believe he was
almost as pleased to see us as Robinson Crusoe was to see the Spaniard
who was brought over by the cannibals to be killed and eaten. What the
old Irishman had been about during our absence I cannot say. He could
not have spent much time in eating, for there was wonderfully little
besides flour, tea, and sugar for him to eat. There was no grog upon
the establishment, so he could not have been drinking. He had
distinctly seen my ghost two nights before. I had been coherently
drowned in the Rangitata; and when he heard us coo-eying he was almost
certain that it was the ghost again.
I had left the V hut warm and comfortable, and on my return found it
very different. I fear we had not put enough thatch upon it, and the
ten days' rain had proved too much for it. It was now neither air-tight
nor water-tight; the floor, or rather the ground, was soaked and soppy
with mud; the nice warm snow-grass on which I had lain so comfortably
the night before I left, was muddy and wet; altogether, there being no
fire inside, the place was as revolting-looking an affair as one would
wish to see: coming wet and cold off a journey, we had hoped for better
things. There was nothing for it but to make the best of it, so we had
tea, and fried some of the beef - the smell of which was anything but
agreeable, for it had been lying ten days on the ground on the other
side the Rangitata, and was, to say the least, somewhat high - and then
we sat in our great-coats on four stones round the fire, and smoked;
then I baked, and one of the cadets washed up; and then we arranged our
blankets as best we could, and were soon asleep, alike unconscious of
the dripping rain, which came through the roof of the hut, and of the
cold, raw atmosphere which was insinuating itself through the numerous
crevices of the thatch.
I had brought up a tin kettle with me. This was a great comfort and
acquisition, for before we had nothing larger than pint pannikins to
fetch up water in from the creek; this was all very well by daylight,
but in the dark the hundred yards from the hut to the creek were no easy
travelling with a pannikin in each hand. The ground was very stony, and
covered with burnt Irishman scrub, against which (the Irishman being
black and charred, and consequently invisible in the dark) I was
continually stumbling and spilling half the water.
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