Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven/Preface
PREFACE
The greater number of these little sketches have appeared already in some of the New Zealand papers, and for permission to reprint them it is my pleasant duty now to thank the editors respectively of the Christchurch Press, the Christchurch Weekly Press, Current Thought, and The Citizen.
The reason why I want to put into book form efforts so fugitive and meagre is, that, with all their faults, they do yet seem to me honestly to delineate in some degree a phase of New Zealand life that is already passing, and that, so far at least as I have been able to gather, lacks not only an abler chronicler, but any chronicler at all. Young things alter very quickly; the lapse of five years, even, can render unrecognisable one of our Bush settlements; and, what with roading and bridging, telephones and motor-cars, movable wash-tubs, and acetylene gas, the rate of our up-country progress is becoming in these days so rapid that it is quite doubtful whether in another twenty years there will be left so much as one Colonial oven for a batch of brown bread to come out of. And the taste of that wholesome baking is to me so sweet that even a paper memory of it seems better than nothing, and I should think myself lucky indeed if so I could convey any least hint of it to those who come after.
One word as to the characters depicted. Let me say straight out and at once that, with one single exception, where permission has been sought and granted, not one is meant as a photograph. Nearly all, it is true, I have done my best to draw from the life; but, after the fashion of most writers, I suppose, from the life of two, three, four models at once, one suggesting the eyes, as it were, of my picture-person; another the nose; others again the mouth or hands; and always in the hope of representing “not what Life has made already,” as the French poet puts it, “but what she might have made.” So that, to those ever-present clever folk, who, in reading the following pages, may find themselves able to point out portraits here and there, I take this opportunity of humbly suggesting that they should give those good keen eyes of theirs just a little further exercise; and, having made the discovery that any loaf, however badly mixed and baked, does really presuppose some growing grain, should go on to remark that, after all, a paddock of wheat is not really one and the same thing as a bit of brown bread.
Clifton, Christchurch, N.Z.