Fortunately, we only understood a fraction of this tirade, yet we trembled and shivered ever afterwards as we drank our tea. Then the doctor showed us how to make sugar-beer, treacle-beer, cabbage-tree-root-beer, honey-beer, peach-cider, corn-cider, and various other drinks of a more or less unlicensed kind. So now we have usually something else to quaff besides tea. Peaches we have in any quantity; and the cider they make is capital stuff. Honey abounds in every hollow tree; and the mead or metheglin we compound is a fine drink. Flour and meal we have to buy. By-and-by there will be a flour-mill at the township, for already some of the more forward settlers near are growing wheat. Maize we do not use ourselves, except as a green vegetable. Some people grind it and use the meal for cakes, but we principally turn it into pig-meat or fowl-flesh. Our garden department, though not always so well managed as it might be, yet adds largely to our food supply. The principal crops are potatoes, kumera (sweet potatoes), and pumpkins; good substantial food that will keep, and, should we have a surplus, will sell. We don't bother with green vegetables; they don't pay, we think, and boiled green maize-cobs suffice us for that class of thing. But, in such seasons as it has occurred to any one to go in for more extensive gardening, we rejoice in a profusion of carrots, turnips, parsnips, onions, taro, beet-root, and sundry other things. Fruit can hardly be looked on as a food; it is merely an ornamental accessory to it, in our opinion. We are great fruit-consumers, but we look on such trifles as only refreshers for odd moments, and not as having anything to do with the serious business of eating. We have pretty well all the fruits that are seen in English gardens, and besides them we have quantities of various sorts of melons and peaches, also specimens of oranges, lemons, shaddocks, grapes, loquats, quinces, pomegranates, guavas, Cape gooseberries, figs, almonds, and some others. We have even bananas, which are a success in most seasons. The marvellous profusion and richness of our fruit-crops, leads to the belief that industries connected with fruit-growing will eventually be found to succeed best in the North. Of course, long practice in cooking has made us tolerably proficient in the simpler processes of the art. Several of us are very fair all-round cooks, but Old Colonial is supreme in this, as in most things. He is a veritable Soyer of the bush. When he chooses to exert his skill he can turn out the most wonderful dishes. Where he learnt, and how he learnt, no one can tell; but he seems to be a perfect master of cookery in every shape and form.