The Old Lad.

A picture forms itself in my mind: I am floating up the pellucid reaches of Queen Charlotte Sounds. By a process of mental calesthenics I am immediately reminded of the Old Lad. The denuded hills are miraculously clothed in billowing forest—towering rimus and totaras thrust their dark heads above the tangled verdure, clots of rata bloom punctuate the mass with vivid splashes of vermillion, like blood flecks on a dead pigeon's breast. I see a white sail scudding before a fresh breeze, I see a monstrous raft of logs drifting with the tide, and dark figures straining at long sweeps to to keep it in the fairway. I pass a solitary shack on a flax-studded promontory and my jaded nerves are lulled by the detached peace of these lonely stretches, undisturbed by pulsing propellers, palpitating pistons, and the multitudinous yelps, squalls, and shrieks which accompany the devastating charge of hectic progress.

I see the Old Lad in the pride of his virile youth—narrow of girth, thick of chest and neck, slim of thigh and calf, with a pair of “moleskins” covering (but not concealing) the slim symmetry of his lower limbs. I admire the calm confidence in his blue eyes, the uncomscious strength in his physical poise. I am back in the “seventies.” I compare him with the Old Lad of to-day—a man four-score, legs slightly bowed, feet planted firmly on the ground, knotted hands, twisted fingers, bristling white whiskers, and fierce blue eyes which are a poor subterfuge to conceal a sympathetic nature. I detect the ghost of his youth in his voice—a hint of waning strength, and it fills me with something like sadness, for the Old Lad is eighty as years count. Nevertheless he still lives in the days of his youth, his eye still twinkles when he recounts the deviltries of his page 14 boyhood, as he loves to do. Comedy, tragedy, cold, hunger, and the daily hazards of a hard life were his portion.