time in New Zealand was mapped out almost to a day, but I wanted to more than I had wanted to do any special thing since I arrived. They were such delightful girls, and I was immensely interested in their work, too, and thought it absolutely miraculous that they could do all they told me about and yet have time for reading and music, golf and dances. They made the butter, did all the cooking, including bread-baking, and jam-making, managed all the housework between them with only very rare outside help, such as a woman to assist on washing-days, made most of their own clothes and mended for the family and household, and groomed their own horses. The brothers farmed the land, milked the cows, sheared the sheep, and had very little more outside assistance than their sisters. They said that servants were more difficult to get and harder to satisfy and keep when engaged than flying fish or shooting stars!
“Even people living in town cannot get the wretches!” said the elder girl. “They all go to factories, shops, or offices, where they have only eight hours a day to work and six working days a week. And I am sure I don’t blame them, though personally I’d rather live a retired life and have a comfortable home with nice people than be in a situation where every Jack, Tom, and Harry has a right to order one about, and one has to live in a lodging-house, most probably sharing a poky room with some other “young lady!” Of course you have found out by now that they are all “young ladies” out here?“
“Oh, so they are, or at least call themselves, at home!” I laughingly replied.
I had learned quite a lot about the Government of the country when at last we had to say good-bye to our fascinating new acquaintances. They wanted to send into town for our luggage and persuade us to indefinitely postpone our onward way, promising, among other inducements, a picnic on the summit of Mount Egmont and a visit to a big Maori Pa. But alas! all our arrangements had been made, and it was too late to break them.
We had some glorious views of the mountain during the day, but the memory of them paled into insignificance when compared to the sight it presented in the sunset. It looked so pure against the gorgeous sky, and yet it glowed as though a flame burned underneath the snow.
“The gold-domed city, with its diamond spire,” murmured Colonel Deane, but it seemed to me too much alive to be compared to a hard, cold diamond,—it was just a great cone of white, soft, snow, concealing a steady fire,—far more like an emblem of pure love than a heartless, glittering, marketable stone.
At sunrise next morning, when we went down to the sea for a closer inspection of the historic “Sugar-loaves” we bade formal adieu to the mysterious, snow-clad sleeping volcano that dominated Taranaki. Just as we reached the summit of the biggest of the group of curious rocks Egmont had
“Caught the chaste morning’s altar fire
That flamed in gold from Orient lands,”
