made good headway and there are lots of them, is very melancholy. The last few miles were very monotonous, especially as the road had been newly metalled and not rolled, so that journeying over it in a very jolty vehicle almost shook us to pieces.
Reefton is prettily situated at the foot of densely wooded hills, but being only a little mining town, planned strictly for use and not ornament, it has nothing but its background to recommend it to an artistic eye. And when we arrived there at four o’clock we drove straight through to the railway station, where we caught a Greymouth train.
This took us through more bush, with only occasional tracts of cleared country, and over an uncountable number of rivers and streams. We were just three hours doing the forty-six miles that divide the little port from the little mining town, and Greymouth was wrapped in the mystery of a dark and rainy evening when we arrived.
The landlord of the dimly-lit, shabby hotel did not seem at all pleased to see us, though he gruffly admitted that he had had Captain Greendays’s letter advising him of our coming, and he looked still less pleased when we intimated that we were in need of dinner.
“Dinner? Dinner’s at six o’clock!” he growled, glowering at us with his bulging, bloodshot eyes.
Mrs Greendays and I followed a nondescript person midway between a porter and a clerk, up a narrow, ricketty stair to our rooms, and left Captain Greendays to parley with the landlord. He succeeded so well that in ten minutes we were summoned downstairs again, and ushered into a dismal room, full of red rep hangings and weird Biblical pictures, by a quaint being in sombre garb who wore uncompromising horn-framed spectacles.
Here an extraordinary meal was served that did not tend to raise our spirits; we were, indeed, so hungry that it was nothing less than a tragedy to find such abominable food set before us. There were some skinny and meagre burnt chops, one each, with some very dry and ancient cold toast, followed by some poisonous tea with condensed milk, sawdusty bread, rank butter, and honey.
Noticing that we seemed somewhat depressed and silent the lady in spectacles decided to act the good Samaritan and cheer us up. So without any warning she suddenly fired off a valuable piece of information.
“I was born in New South Wales!” she said, apropos of nothing, though perhaps the arid nature of our chops and toast had recalled her birthplace to her mind. And then after a pause which we had all been too much taken by surprise to break, she added, “And reared here!”
There was another pregnant pause; convulsions threatened us, and we dared not venture upon speech.
And then, gazing fixedly, at us through her spectacles, she repeated, solemnly, as if the fact conferred upon her a dignity not to be lightly mentioned, “Yes, reared here!”
