sore straits at times, both land and woman had suffered in those bygone days—not bygone so very far yet, either.
The hills grew steeper as we proceeded, and the road rougher, but Brownie was a good horse, and she had a resolute driver. “They’ll have begun the stacking to-day, I shouldn’t wonder,” Dad kept observing, whenever there was a pause in the talk; and we made good time. It was not yet quite nine o’clock, when we passed a hollow filled with glossy karaka, mounted the hill above it, up which ripe grasses ran before the wind—and there we were, at a white gate before a thick plantation, and—yes! they had “begun the stacking.” Dad flung the reins to a girl who came flying out of the gate just as we stopped before it, kissed her somehow as he passed her, and bounded straight for the oat-paddock, pulling off his coat as he ran.
“Let him go!” says Mother with an indulgent smile, leisurely descending in her turn from the gig. “Well, Flo, how’s everybody?”
“Oh, fine!” says Flo, a big, broad-shouldered girl, of perhaps eighteen, with a happy face, a friendly smile, and two long plaits of rich dark hair hanging nearly to her waist. “How do you do?” (to me) “you must be pretty well starving, I’m sure! I’ll take Brownie, Mum, you two go in. Nance is in the kitchen.”
So we leave Flo to unharness, and turn in at the gate. The path beyond it leads, first, through an avenue of breakwind pines, through which, turning for a moment to look back at Flo, I catch the smile of sunlit sea half a mile or so away; and then out upon an open space, bright with hardy flowers,
