Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/70

52 having a solid book stowed in the saddlebags, I get through a good deal of reading. I have recently mastered, after many a perusal, Mansel's Bampton Lectures, tough reading, but full of trenchant argument, and most interesting to anyone who has sat at his feet in Magdalen and listened to his expositions of Aristotle's Ethics, as you and I have done. As I often ride for hours meeting no one, I get through, in this manner, almost as much as if I were in my own study, and now and then I find that a sharp canter helps me wonderfully to see the drift of an intricate passage, on the principle of "solvitur ambulando."

Imagine yourself with me on one of my hill country expeditions. Arriving at noon at a shepherd's hut, we meet with a ready welcome and a substantial meal. There are children here, and, after dinner, I give them some teaching, partly in the Bible, and set them lessons to be ready for my next visit, enough to occupy them daily for some weeks. "There is a shepherd" says my host, "away up in the hills in the direction you are going, but out of the usual track; he scarcely ever sees anyone but the overseer of the station, and I think would welcome a visit from you, but I must tell you he is an old sailor, so accustomed to solitude, that you will find it hard to get any speech out of him; he goes by the name of 'Cranky Bill,' and they say never speaks a word except to his dogs and sheep."

Towards evening, after a long ride, I spied the hut on a spur below the ridge I was crossing, and made for it. A couple of dogs set up a noisy welcome, and the shepherd himself, just returned from his day's tramp, looked up and gazed at me, giving a sort of a nod of invitation, but never a word. Accepting the