Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/119

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SKETCHES IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA.

instance, of being able to cook a dinner for "all hands," as Rosa styled the family, had appeared to me, I must own, exceedingly dismal on the day that I first surveyed our colonial kitchen range. But Rosa made light of all difficulties, and under her tuition I soon acquired the habit of making our meagre stock of kitchen utensils supply all our wants. The range consisted simply of three long iron bars set in two short ones, the whole supported upon four legs, which were no higher than just to leave room for logs of wood underneath. There was neither oven nor boiler, and the being compelled to trust to kettles and pans alone for all one's hot water, after having been accustomed to a good Leamington range at home, seemed like a coming down in life. Rosa, however, soon proved to me that where there was a will there was always a way, and that by "capsizing" kettle after kettle into a large wooden tub even a warm bath might soon be obtained. Of fire-irons a little shovel was the only representative, tongs being of no use in lifting logs cut in four-foot lengths; whilst the handle of a worn-out besom proved an efficient substitute for the time-honoured kitchen poker where there was nothing but wood embers to stir. The hearth and the sides of the wide open fireplace were composed of bricks, very roughly set, which Rosa kept scrupulously white with what she was pleased to call pipeclay, sometimes indulging her pictorial tastes by an after-embellishment of the snowy surface with a trellis-pattern traced in blue. Rosa's white pigment, of which she used to persuade Khourabene to bring her large lumps from time to time from the bush, would have fetched a high price in England, being in fact the