Page:Old Westland (1939).pdf/173

Rh was outstanding. Here is a description of this celebrity, culled from the files of the West Coast Times, Westland’s first newspaper: “A short, thick-set, muscular man, strong of will and resolute of purpose with a weakness for Nelson ale, and massive greenstone pendants to his watch chain, was Blake. A man who was more at home on a vessel’s deck than behind a counter, and could handle a steer-oar better than a steel pen. In short, like the redoubtable old king, ‘whose mark for Rex was a single X, and whose drink was ditto, double,’ Blake ‘scorned the fetters of four and twenty letters,’ and it saved him a vast deal of trouble. Yet a shrewd character was Isaac Blake.

“The first time we visited the town which bore his name we crowded into the kitchen of his little slab store and regaled ourselves on a half-crown’s worth of ships’ biscuit and butter, prefaced by a thin rasher of bacon and a couple of high-coloured malodorous eggs, the whole dignified by the name of dinner, and, being somewhat pushed for room, we remarked upon the fact, and suggested that our host should get more commodious premises. ‘Aye, aye,’ was the response, ‘if the Coast goes ahead, I’ll get some congregated iron from Nelson.’ No orthœpist but an able dealer, he did not believe in parting with his goods unless he received full value in return. A poet of the period, who