Page:Brown·Bread·from·a·Colonial·Oven-Baughan-1912.pdf/49

 to recount. From bow to stern, to begin with, the deck was overlaid with a consignment of yellow-brown kauri timber, the uppermost tier of which was fairly on a level with her rail; and on top of this were heaped and piled, lashed and carefully secured under a great tarpaulin, a multitude of queer-looking lumps, whose nature it was far from easy to determine: together with a quantity of casks, kegs, and oil-tins, many wooden cases, and a boat for some settler upon the coast—rurally converted, this last, for the time being, into an agreeable vignette of barn-door life at sea; for the bow and body of it were richly green with fine fat cabbages and cauliflowers, while the stern was shared by a black, red-ribboned cat (passenger), and a rooster in a coop. There was also a lady-like camellia, in a pot, displaying its glossy leaves just forward of the “house,” and all but concealing a certain little dark gap in the deck, and a miniature funnel close by. The gap, I found afterwards, was the entrance to a tiny engine-room; the funnel took one by the nose with a double-distilled breath of benzine, and explained itself on the spot as belonging to the little auxiliary oil-engine. It was early in the days of engines aboard such vessels as the Tikirau, and ours was something of an adventurous innovation. . . . To tell the truth, there were times when it was all adventure! Lack of pretence was its abounding virtue, and seldom, indeed, so long as I knew it, did it dissemble, by any false alacrity in starting, its deep reluctance to proceed. On the starboard beam, a beautiful whale-boat painted white, like the rest of the ship, swung from her davits; fore- and main-masts shot