clothing the little ones that have to run out into the rainy cold. In the young colony, the sweet English young lady was but an incompetent drudge—not only ignorant as regards work, but seemingly without the capacity to learn. The other women of the settlement were good to her; it is a man’s mistake to think that women will not stand by each other, and Eva’s sweetness and her helplessness appealed to the mother in the coarsest fibred of them. They were one and all Englishwomen, too, of the English working-class, and they understood her plight. “Poor young thing!” they said, “and she such a lady, too!” So they managed, by degrees, to teach her a little cooking, and they used to “just happen in,” to help with her cleaning and washing. And Eva was very grateful to these kindly souls, despite their missing “h’s” and red arms—Joel, unluckily, had had a smatter of refinement, tongue-deep—but she never made friends with them—she was too “kept her distance,” and they theirs.
It was a dark day for her, nevertheless, when Joel decided that there was “easy money in cheese,” and dragged Eva away from the settlement and her good neighbours, into the hills—here, where we sit. It was lucky for her that her one child had been born some months before, and that it was a strong, healthy little thing, ready, like a true New Zealander, to make the best of whatever it could get; for you can see for yourself what the distance was from the bay to the wretched wharé that Joel put up here. The one or two visitors that did get as far, too, he received so badly that no others cared to court a like experience; Eva, entering these
