Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/37

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8
SKETCHES IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA.

although it was out of the same cask of pork then in use in the cabin, the goodness of which we had especially noticed. In fact all the arrangements for the food and general comfort of the emigrants were so good, that I often used to wish that some of the respectable poor whom I had known at home were there to enjoy them; but this was before I knew the colony to which we were sailing, and the dangerous prospects it presents to respectable women if unmarried and without parents.

Our voyage had, upon the whole, been a most prosperous one. Since we had left the Channel we had enjoyed a succession of lovely weather, and had only been forced to "lay-to" on one day—that which I have already mentioned; but while in the Channel the weather had for ten days been very stormy and severe. Indeed, on one or two occasions during that time, we had had to encounter very serious gales, accompanied with some real danger and with much discomfort to the emigrants. During the worst of the weather my husband used to go down into the married people's quarters to look after the women and children, and to give them biscuits and raisins and any little dainties with which we had provided ourselves for our own use on the voyage.

There was one emigrant from the far north of Scotland—I think the Shetland Isles—whose wife was always ill and low-spirited, let the weather be what it might, and who, when at her worst, could suggest nothing eatable that she fancied except "a Wick herring," drawled out in such very broad Scotch as took a practised ear to understand. "A wee drap o' whuskey," which she proposed as an accompaniment to the herring, my husband was able to