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The only thing to remind me that I was not in an English cottage was the opossum rug with which the neat little bed was covered. The sitting-room looked the picture of cosy comfort, with its well-filled book-shelves, arm-chairs, sofa with another opossum rug thrown over it, and the open fireplace filled with ferns and tufts of the white feathery Tohi grass in front of the green background.
Poplars, willows, and the blue gum grow quickest, are least affected by the high winds, and are therefore the most popular. The banks of the pretty little river Avon, upon which Christchurch is built, are thickly fringed with weeping willows, interspersed with a few other trees, and with clumps of tohi, which is exactly like the Pampas grass you know so well in English shrubberies.
The next step is to build a sod but with two rooms on their property, thatching it with Tohi, or swamp grass; a door and a couple of window-frames all ready glazed are brought from Christchurch in the dray with the family and the household goods. After this rough and ready shelter is provided, the father and sons begin fencing their land and gradually it all assumes a cultivated appearance.
"Tessa," she said one day, sidling up to that Tessa Bibye who had cast a taunt in her teeth, "know you the charm which that doctress of the Crees gave to Marci Varendree when she sickened for love of that half-breed, Tohi Stannard?" "Oho!" cried Tessa gleefully, "a man again! Who lacks one now, Francette?"
When startled or hunted, the weka glides, for it can scarcely be called running, with incredible swiftness and in perfect silence, to the nearest cover. A tussock, a clump of flax, a tuft of tall tohi grass, all serve as hiding-places; and, wingless as she is, the weka can hold her own very well against her enemies, the dogs. I really believe the great desire of Brisk's life was to catch a weka.
The hoarse roar of the river over its rocky bed was the only sound; now and then a flock of wild ducks would come flying down to their roosting-place or nests among the Tohi grass; and as the evening closed in the melancholy cry of the bittern and the weka's loud call broke the stillness, but only to make it appear more profound.
Outside, the dog-kennels had been newly thatched with tohi grass, the garden weeded and freshly dug, the chopping-block and camp-oven as clean as scrubbing could make them. It was too late in the year for fruit, but Salter's currant, raspberry, and gooseberry bushes gave us a good idea of how well he must have fared in the summer.
A few yards from the fence he made one rush and a bound towards what seemed only a clump of Tohi bushes, but they broke the force of the current and gave him the chance he wanted, and he struggled up the high crumbling bank more like a cat than a steady old screw. Helen would not be left behind, and, with a good spur from Mr.
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