wrapped up in his blankets and his head in a bag. I roused him up; he informed me the bag acted in place of a mosquito net. I pointed to some flour in regular tracks, and asking the meaning of it, he said it was to keep the rats from the flour bags and his head. “Daddy,” in course of time, went into business on his own account, made money, and is now in an independent position. Sweeney was a genial, good-natured sort of fellow; in fact his good nature was the ruin of him, inasmuch as he always had a lot of “hangers on” at the store; men whom he had known at different times and at different places, and who imposed on him. On one occasion I said to him, “Why are these fellows, who are as well able to work as you are, loafing about you?” He laughed and said, “What’s the odds, it’s only a feed; I don’t miss it; may be hard up myself some day.” Many a pound he gave away, to men who were too lazy to work. Poor fellow, he has joined the great majority; he died in Auckland in 1875 of consumption, leaving a wife and family totally unprovided for.
The following extract is from a West Coast paper. Many a meal I have had in the kitchen referred to. Blake had a good help-mate in his wife, coined money in the “good old times,” and is now living on his means:—
“A short, thick-set, muscular man, strong of will and resolute of purpose, with a weakness for Nelson ale and massive greenstone pendants to his watch-chain, was Blake. A man who was more at home on a vessel’s deck than behind a counter, and could handle a steer-oar better than a steel pen. In short, like that redoubtable old king, ‘whose mark for Rex was a single x, and whose drink was ditto, double,’ Blake ‘scorned the fetters of four and twenty letters,’ and it saved him a vast deal of trouble. Yet a shrewd character was Isaac Blake. The first time we visited the town that bore his name we crowded into the kitchen of his little slab store and regaled ourselves on a half-crown’s worth of ship biscuit and butter, prefaced by a thin rasher of bacon and a couple of high-coloured malodorous eggs, the whole dignified by the name of dinner, and being somewhat pushed for room, we remarked upon the fact, and suggested that our host should get more commodious premises. ‘Aye, aye,’ was the response, ‘if the Coast goes ahead, I’ll get some congregated iron from Nelson.’ No orthœpist but an able dealer, he did not believe in parting with his goods unless he received full value in return. A poet of the period, who had possibly been refused drinks on account, thus gave vent to his spleen:—
‘Old Blake is the mercantile lion
The king of the beasts of the port
Your putting-through tricks you may try on,
But he’s not the one to be caught.
