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Butler, Samuel, 1835-1902

"A First Year in Canterbury Settlement"

etc., as the case may be. I am informed
that the having faithfully learned the ingenuous arts, has so far
mollified his morals that he is an exceedingly humane and judicious
bullock-driver. He regarded me as a somewhat despicable new-comer (at
least so I imagined), and when next morning I asked where I should wash,
he gave rather a French shrug of the shoulders, and said, "The lake." I
felt the rebuke to be well merited, and that with the lake in front of
the house, I should have been at no loss for the means of performing my
ablutions. So I retired abashed and cleansed myself therein. Under his
bed I found Tennyson's Idylls of the King. So you will see that even in
these out-of-the-world places people do care a little for something
besides sheep. I was told an amusing story of an Oxford man shepherding
down in Otago. Someone came into his hut, and, taking up a book, found
it in a strange tongue, and enquired what it was. The Oxonian (who was
baking at the time) answered that it was Machiavellian discourses upon
the first decade of Livy. The wonder-stricken visitor laid down the
book and took up another, which was, at any rate, written in English.


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