Towards afternoon the captain of the Sarah Ann came on board, after
concluding his business with the agents.
"Good luck to you, Murray; make sail, and let's be off, for I sha'n't
feel as if the old Sally is safe till we've left this beautiful spot a
hundred knots astern. The poor skipper of that schooner's ashore there,
and he's half mad, and no wonder."
The captain made his way below, the anchor was weighed, sail after sail
dropped down, and then, with a pleasant breeze astern, the old barque
slowly began to force her way through the bright and transparent waters,
making the sunlit windows of Port Caroline grow more and more distant,
while Edward Murray's heart gladdened within him, as he thought of the
prolonged stay for discharging and loading that would be made in Kaitaka
Bay, New Zealand.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
STORY THREE, CHAPTER THREE.
GOLDEN GAP.
"`And I said, if there's peace in this world to be found'--Go on, Joey,
will you?--`The--he heart that is humble might welcome it here,'" sang
and said a sturdy-looking, hard-faced man, with cleanly-shaven chin and
upper lip, and a pair of well-trimmed grizzly whiskers. He was somewhat
sun-browned, but wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, and in addition, as he
strode a very weedy, meditative-looking pony, he carried up a large
gingham umbrella.
"Well, Joey!" he continued, apostrophising the pony, which had come to a
full stop; "you're a sensible beast, and it _is_ a beautiful spot, and
`the heart that is humble' might truly `welcome it here.' What a
paradise! They may well call it Golden Gap! Golden, indeed! A
heavenly gilding--no dross here! No more like Battersea Fields than I'm
like an archangel. Well, Joey, suppose we meditate, then, for half an
hour. You shall chew your herb, and I'll smoke mine, even if it be not
canonical. I don't like good things to be wasted, as my old mother used
to say. Savages smoke, so why should not a parson?"
Slowly dismounting, he closed his umbrella, unbuckled the pony's bridle,
that he might graze, and then, seating himself beneath a huge tree-fern,
he filled and lit his pipe, and began to enjoy its fragrance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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