THE PLACES OF CONTENT.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 31, 13 March 1914, Page 6

THE PLACES OF CONTENT.

CLOSE TO THE GREAT EARTH-MOTHER. [Specially written for The Sun.] The ways of .peace are with the man on the land, who works hard and sleeps well o' nights. In the country there is meditative calm, and men do* not worry oyer trivial things there, they merely discuss them, interminably. There are~ so few important things to discuss, for wars and rumours of war are as vague.- murmuvs in these daunts of quiet, and it is not every day that a man breaks his leg or a neighbour has an addition to her family. One such place I returned to not so very many months ago—a. land of golden afternoon, stowed away from strife and turmoil in a somnolent coiner of Hawke's Bay.* Yet, when I saw it first, it was a wide, stretch, of bush country, where the mill-saws sang busily every day,' and bullock teams trailed their freight of logs from out the green gloom. - ' " " -" ' " A Successful Burn. But that was years ago. I came back, and where there was once bush there was a clearing—a wide clearing of rustling, amber-coloured .grass, and dotted over it were blackened lpgSj and here and' there, standing sentinel-like, the scorched trunks' of "what had once been trees. The mills had "cut out'/ and the fire had been put through the country. There had "been what the selectors call "A successful burn." It was not the old plaee as I recalled it, but it was in some sense more fragrant with reminiscence than ever it could have been had it, remain unchanged. One old mill remained, sadly attenuated, working out its lease of what /timber remained,, arid the drone of its saws heard across the clearings on the midsummer afternoon, harmonising with--the murmur of the. myriad bees in the' subtly lulled the mind into agreement with the pervading drowsiness of Nature. Story of the Lean Gnarled Man. Wandering across the clearings I met George; he had not changed since the years when he had taught me the lore of the bush. The lean, gnarled man was swinging rhythmically at the end of an axe —putting a scarf into one of the blackened" totaras, preparatory to cut : ting it into fencing posts. It was an excuse for a spell and a smoke when I arrived, and so we sat and talked, and lie told me the interminable story of the immemorable events of a bush township. . Afterwards I helped him to put the cross-cut" 1 through' the stuinp. He said he was getting fourpence apiece for totara posts, and one-and-threepence for strainers. ,There was c a, lpt of, good totara to split, and he was knocking out about £3 10/- a week, but two men could do better. He looked diffidently at me As he said it, and I hastened to tell mm that I was on four weeks' holiday tins time, but I didn't mind helping him occasionally: The end of it was that I spent most of my holiday wielding axe and saw, maul and wedge, out under the. blazing sun of the cleanings !j but it was'a good holiday, and possibly Tom Sawyer was not the first ta discover that work. is doing something because one must, and pleasure is doing the same thing when one doesn't have to v .

George and the City. George had been as far away from home as Gisborne since I had last seen him—a great adventure. He was nearly 50, and knew the bush for a hundred miles round, but he had never seen the pavements of a, city, and he would listen with wondering interest to my plain tales of. tram-cars, and the sea and its. ships, what time the tea in the billy boiled to a Ijlack syrup. But he was not discontented—the tale of the city was as the story of lands hopelessly •remote—as unattainable as that Fountain of Youth which Ponce de Leon sought in the days before the Armada. The bush was George's home, his only, possible environment,; and, to see him unerringly point to one black log as a totara and to another as a rata was to realise that the long associations that had. given him this erring knowledge had also, rooted him to the soil beyond possibility of transplanting. Glamour of the Bush. And he was happy in his uneventful days, as I was. To tramp through the waist-high bracken in the keen air of early morning, and to saw and split logs until the sun, like a shield of glowing bronze, hung noon-high in a sky of translucent blue, was to earn the'perfect contentment, the quiet vigour of elemental hian. Physical weariness kept the imagination upon placid ways, and the fragrance of grass and trees,, the crooning of the creeks, the sweet ■ monotony of the song of birds, and the lazy drift of the clouds and their shadowy all mingled to make somnolent harmony in' one's mind. Who could be unhappy in a" freedom where one day was so like another that time had little meaning! When the sun made noon, we brewed tea and ate, and smoked in the shadow of the bush that fringed the clearing. Parakeets . flitted through the gloom like flashes of verdant flame, the bell-note of the tui chimed amongst the leaves, and afar off the drone of the mill-saw sang the monody of noon-day calm. Under the Fires of Sunset. When the' late sun hung just above the trees, • a faint smoke-haze transforming it to a red ball of fire, and making the tree-tops glow in an intensified green, we put our ■ axes and our saw inside a hollow log and went down into the cold waters of a river pool. Then there was home, and the gladness that comes to tired and hungry men when they have eaten and rested. As the last fires of the sunset burned away between the trunks of the sparse trees, and the gold faded to mysterious green, a white mist clothed the clearings, and vespers" were called by faint-heard cattle bells. A pale moon rose, the' owl came out of its thicket and called eerily from the bush, and inside the whare the great grey moths came flitting ghost-like in the dusk. Deep sleep fell upon all things. There is no frenzy of effort, neither keen joy nor anguish for the man who lives close to the great calm of the Earth-mother, for him all things happen in an atmosphere of contentment, and the accepted quiet of. his ways is good to think of when one has long been harried by the clangour of city streets and the dusty confusion of pavements, $ > . ; D.H.