the country an’ me was young together, nigh on sixty years agone. Eh, dear me, them days! Only to think of ’em’s like goin’ out into the paddock right early when the sunshine’s on the dew. . . . Got the table all fixed? That’s right. Then now we can begin.
“Well, father an’ mother an’ me come out together, as you know, early in the fifties, when I was but seven year old; an’ nearly five months we was in comin’, by the way; like everythin’ else, ships was slower then. Soon almost as we’d a-landed here in port (that was pretty nigh nothin’ else then, only tents, mind you), father, he got word for to go down to sawpit work, down along the coast. An’ so, down along the coast we went, in a little bit of a cutter; an’ all day long it took us, the men sayin’ it was a good trip, too; an’ by the time we got there, in the evenin’, it was a-rainin’, an’ a-blowin’ very cold; an’ never will I forget the look upon my poor dear mother’s face as she sat in that boat a-gazin’ an’ a-gazin’ on the land, an’ a-seein’ what she’d left London town for!
“It was just a little bit of a beach, at the top of a long narrow bay, that looked for all the world like a finger o’ water, two or three miles long, stuck up in between the hills, an’ a-dintin’ of ’em down—but there! you know the Bay. It looked a bit different though in them days; for the hills, that’s grass all over now, an’ cocksfoot, was covered then with standin’ Bush—there was Bush, and nothin’ but Bush, for what looked like miles above the sand, as well as miles on either side of it; an’ the only other thing to be glimpsed, strain your sight how you would, was three or four funny-lookin’ huts,
