A Small Chest Of Drawers Would Have Been
Preferable To A Couple Of Boxes For My Clothes, And I Should Recommend
Another To Get One.
A ten-pound note will suffice for all these things.
The bunk should not be too wide:
One rolls so in rough weather; of
course it should not be athwartships, if avoidable. No one in his right
mind will go second class if he can, by any hook or crook, raise money
enough to go first.
On the whole, there are many advantageous results from a sea-voyage.
One's geography improves apace, and numberless incidents occur pregnant
with interest to a landsman; moreover, there are sure to be many on
board who have travelled far and wide, and one gains a great deal of
information about all sorts of races and places. One effect is,
perhaps, pernicious, but this will probably soon wear off on land. It
awakens an adventurous spirit, and kindles a strong desire to visit
almost every spot upon the face of the globe. The captain yarns about
California and the China seas - the doctor about Valparaiso and the
Andes - another raves about Hawaii and the islands of the Pacific - while
a fourth will compare nothing with Japan.
The world begins to feel very small when one finds one can get half
round it in three months; and one mentally determines to visit all these
places before coming back again, not to mention a good many more.
I search my diary in vain to find some pretermitted adventure wherewith
to give you a thrill, or, as good Mrs. B. calls it, "a feel"; but I can
find none. The mail is going; I will write again by the next.
CHAPTER III
Aspect of Port Lyttelton - Ascent of Hill behind it - View - Christ Church-
-Yankeeisms - Return to Port Lyttelton and Ship - Phormium Tenax - Visit to
a Farm - Moa Bones.
January 27, 1860. - Oh, the heat! the clear transparent atmosphere, and
the dust! How shall I describe everything - the little townlet, for I
cannot call it town, nestling beneath the bare hills that we had been
looking at so longingly all the morning - the scattered wooden boxes of
houses, with ragged roods of scrubby ground between them - the tussocks
of brown grass - the huge wide-leafed flax, with its now seedy stem,
sometimes 15 or 16 feet high, luxuriant and tropical-looking - the
healthy clear-complexioned men, shaggy-bearded, rowdy-hatted, and
independent, pictures of rude health and strength - the stores, supplying
all heterogeneous commodities - the mountains, rising right behind the
harbour to a height of over a thousand feet - the varied outline of the
harbour now smooth and sleeping. Ah me! pleasant sight and fresh to
sea-stricken eyes. The hot air, too, was very welcome after our long
chill.
We dined at the table d'hote at the Mitre - so foreign and yet so
English - the windows open to the ground, looking upon the lovely
harbour. Hither come more of the shaggy clear-complexioned men with the
rowdy hats; looked at them with awe and befitting respect. Much grieved
to find beer sixpence a glass. This was indeed serious, and was one of
the first intimations which we received that we were in a land where
money flies like wild-fire.
After dinner I and another commenced the ascent of the hill between port
and Christ Church. We had not gone far before we put our knapsacks on
the back of the pack-horse that goes over the hill every day (poor pack-
horse!). It is indeed an awful pull up that hill; yet we were so
anxious to see what was on the other side of it that we scarcely noticed
the fatigue: I thought it very beautiful. It is volcanic, brown, and
dry; large intervals of crumbling soil, and then a stiff, wiry,
uncompromising-looking tussock of the very hardest grass; then perhaps a
flax bush, or, as we should have said, a flax plant; then more crumbly,
brown, dry soil, mixed with fine but dried grass, and then more
tussocks; volcanic rock everywhere cropping out, sometimes red and
tolerably soft, sometimes black and abominably hard. There was a great
deal, too, of a very uncomfortable prickly shrub, which they call
Irishman, and which I do not like the look of at all. There were cattle
browsing where they could, but to my eyes it seemed as though they had
but poor times of it. So we continued to climb, panting and broiling in
the afternoon sun, and much admiring the lovely view beneath. At last
we near the top, and look down upon the plain, bounded by the distant
Apennines, that run through the middle of the island. Near at hand, at
the foot of the hill, we saw a few pretty little box-like houses in
trim, pretty little gardens, stacks of corn and fields, a little river
with a craft or two lying near a wharf, whilst the nearer country was
squared into many-coloured fields. But, after all, the view was rather
of the "long stare" description. There was a great extent of country,
but very few objects to attract the eye and make it rest any while in
any given direction. The mountains wanted outlines; they were not
broken up into fine forms like the Carnarvonshire mountains, but were
rather a long, blue, lofty, even line, like the Jura from Geneva or the
Berwyn from Shrewsbury. The plains, too, were lovely in colouring, but
would have been wonderfully improved by an object or two a little nearer
than the mountains. I must confess that the view, though undoubtedly
fine, rather disappointed me. The one in the direction of the harbour
was infinitely superior.
At the bottom of the hill we met the car to Christ Church; it halted
some time at a little wooden public-house, and by and by at another,
where was a Methodist preacher, who had just been reaping corn for two
pounds an acre.
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