I had brought a tiny phial of cream in the pocket of my saddle, but the men thought it spoiled the flavour of the tea, which they always drink "_neat_," as they call it.

The Temperance Society could draw many interesting statistics from the amount of hard work which is done in New Zealand on tea.

Now, I am sorry to say, beer is creeping up to the stations, and is served out at shearing time and so on; but in the old days all the hard work used to be done on tea, and tea alone, the men always declaring they worked far better on it than on beer.

"When we have as much good bread and mutton as we can eat," they would say, "we don't feel to miss the beer we used to drink in England;" and at the end of a year or two of tea and water-drinking, their bright eyes and splendid physical condition showed plainly enough which was the best kind of beverage to work, and work hard too, upon.
So there we sat round the fire: F---- with the men, and I, a little way off, out of the smoke, with the dogs.

Overhead, the sunlight streamed down on the grass which had sprung up, as it always does in a clearing; the rustle among the lofty tree tops made a delicious murmur high up in the air; a waft of cool breeze flitted past us laden with the scent of newly-cut wood (and who does not know that nice, _clean_ perfume ?); innumerable paroquets almost brushed us with their emerald-green wings, whilst the tamer robin or the dingy but melodious bell-bird came near to watch the intruders.