TEA AND SILK FARMING IN NEW ZEALAND. 177 



pleted, every evening brought saturnalia which generally ex- 

 tended into the folio wino^ mornincr. After the recurrence of a 

 number of these mild little scenes of dissipation, the writer began 

 to fear that his small store of information and anecdote must fail 

 under the constant battery of questions from an audience which 

 was in great part renewed on each occasion. Curiously enough, 

 no matter what topic might have been started, the conversation 

 quickly drifted to machinery, which remorselessly swallowed up all 

 others. Steam engines, marine and locomotive, pumping, boring, 

 and hammering implements supplied an inexhaustible fund for 

 discussion ; all of which the unfortunate stranger was forced to 

 describe and illustrate to the best of his limited ability, by the 

 aid of his pencil and a few daubs of colour. On one occasion, 

 the dawn of a lovely morning broke over the still unsatisfied 

 Celestials, but without showing the slightest symptoms of weari- 

 ness in them, or creating a pause in the hurricane of queries. 

 What was to be done ? Change the subject as he might, and 

 yawn as he pleased, the writer was immediately brought back 

 by his enthusiastic friends to pinions, cranks, pistons, wheels, 

 boilers, and explosions ; all of which he had to sketch over and 

 over again, every scrap of paper so decorated being carefully 

 pocketed and carried off. At length a bright idea occurred to 

 his fatigued and whirling? brain. Amom:j the few instruments 

 and articles of luggage the writer had with him was an atmo- 

 spheric coffee-making apparatus. Obtaining a supply of hot 

 water, sugar, milk, and cups, he put a spoonful of w^ater into the 

 bulb, set the fountain to work, lighted the spirit-lamp, and told 

 his amiable tormentors to watch. Upon the fountain the eyes 

 of the Chinamen were speedily rivetted as it presently began to 

 boil, their wonder and excitement au^mentincr as the ebullition 

 became furious without, to their apprehension, any apparent 

 reason. It was a strange, weird scene, rendered all the more 

 impressive by the attitudes of the eager beings as they contem- 

 plated the lambent flame caressing the apparently empty globe. 

 From the dark brown, richly carved and varnished timbers of 

 the roof many lanterns depended, some of which had gone 

 out ; the first faint blusli of morning tinged the latticed tracery 

 at the end of the hall, showing a huge grotesque idol in a niche 

 before which the remains of four once tall candles guttered ; the 

 muffled hum from a thousand tea manipulators floated in from 

 the adjoining factory; whilst in the immediate foreground stood 

 the tired out demonstrator still holding his students with as 

 potent a spell as the scarcest ancient manuscript, or the most 

 uni(|ue fossil could have exercised over a meeting of savants in 

 Europe. If the almond-shaped eyes of the Chinamen opened 

 widely when the coffee began to boil without any immediate 

 cause, they seemed as if about to start from their sockets when, 



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