THE GOOD OLD TIMES.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1238, 18 July 1872, Page 3

THE GOOD OLD TIMES.

41 Visions of long departed joys."— Spenser. The good old times, the great old times, the grand old times, with Blaketown for ■ the capital of the Coast, ere Thompson, Smith, and Barkley became an institution, and' when miners enjoyed their otiwn sine dignitate, in the whitest of moleskins and the gaudiest of crimeans. . Who can take any interest in the digger of these degenerate days? During a recent visit to Greymouth,' I met an acquaintance — a miner.forsooth— going to a> Rechabite lecture; he was gorgeously arrayed in.apaget soit. Ha elastip-ride 1 boots resplendent witfi Day and Martin ; and his hands— tell it not in Oath—encased in gloves. I invited him to whisky. He declined.., We are strangers. I shudder when I think of the fate of that man had he appeared so clad in the good old days of Blaketown when clothing was scarce, money plentiful, and withering conventionality unknown. Then Resident Magistrates Courts 1 . existed not, and all differences of opinion were settled by an appeal to arms and fists. "'Times change, and we change irith .the times.' ■ Blaketown fi no more, and old Blake, the mercantilepioneer of the Coast, has cleared out with a pile. To scribble of the early days of the Coast without mentioning Blake, would be like writing the history of the game of whist without referring to Hoyle. So here goes for a short biographicaf sketch bfthe man to whom the Coast owes much.. A short thick-set, muscular man— strong of will, and resolute of purpose— with a weakness for Nelson ale and mas«ve greenstone pendants to his watch- - phain,was Blake— a man who was more at home on a vessel's deck than behind a • counter— and could handle a steer-oar better than a steel pen— in short like that redoubtable old king— , V Whose mark for Rex was a single X, " And whose drink was ditto,' double, Blake "scorned the fetters of four-and- '■■^> twenty liters." And it saved him a vast deal of trouble. Yet a shrewd character was Isaac Blake. The first time we visited the town that bore his name, we crowded into the kitchen of hialittleslab store and regaled ourselves on half-a-crown's worth of ship's biscuit atfd butter, prefaced by a thin rasher of bacon and a couple of highcoloured malodorous eggs— the whole dignified by the name of dinner— and, being somewhat pushed for room, we remarked upon the fact and suggested that our host should get more -commodious premises. "Aye, aye," was the response. Vjtt, the Ooast goes a-head, I'll get gome congregated iron, from Nelson, 1 ' „ i|[o orthofiapist, but an able dealer, he did pot believe in parting with his goods , unless he received fjoll value, in return. A poet of the period, who had possibly been refus<4 drinks on account, thus gave vent to his spleen—- «♦ Old Blake Is the mercantile lion, The king of the beasts of the port. Your putting through tricks you may try r:-\ '.*«- «B, ■■■- , : ; - ' ■•'• : ■ ; But he's not the cove to be caught." But, though a rough unlettered man, naturally rough, and not made any smoother by years oMiard buffeting with nife as rude aa himself, Blake still pSwessed a little of the poetry of childhood.. The love of the beautiful that is implanted in all youthful breasts was not altogether dead within his, and when the above lines were warbled to him by a $aK-inrtoxicated customer, the pioneer shouted for all hands, and vowed that the writer of "that ere song" should never want a fifty of flour while he remained on the Coast. Anothercharacteristic anecdote showing the man's firmness and sensibility ; and we let Blake slide. He received a business

(For continuation of JSewa ace 4th Page.,

letter. I waditfdrhim ; it merely o^onUined invoiceafßf rgoo4s~<nd -soljctted farther patronage, "What's on the" envelope V said Blake. "Your name and laddreM," I answered. "What's that behind the namef "Esquire," I replied. " Well, I'm d-- * aaid the merchint, "I've laid oat money — cash down — hundreds of pounds with that firm, and now they take a rw« out of a man, calling hMm Esquire ; not another penny will they see of my money," he added with an oath ; and he kept his word. ' | .. " Lives of great men all remind its, "■ \ We may make oar lives sublime, \ And departing leave behind ns ' Foot-pnnts on the sands of time." Blaketown had its day, and its glory departed. " How's trade?" I asked one morning shortly after Greymouth was declared a township. "There ain't bin a fight this week," was the answer. It was brief and, to the uninitiated, ambiguous ; bat to me it told a sad tale of rum and decay. | The order of the rushes up the Grey River was Blackball, first, and smallest; Moonlight, second, and more extensive; Twelve-Mile, third, and most extensive. In fact it was the latter place that started Greymonth ; althoufh'the beach diggings sustained it, and caused it to increase to it's present proportions. We had the honor of keeping the first store on the Twelve-Mile, yet we did not make ; a fortune. Strange. Not very. Tne truth is, we struck a bad streak, and were rather too soon. Everyone was getting good gold, and no one for love or money could be got to build a substantial place; and. although the regular miner is as a rulo a straightforward honest sort of ; fellow, yet your regular rush-follower 'has not very nice notions in the matter of meum et tuwn ; and the consequence was that, though I sold a heap of stores over the counter, I got rid of good heaps more through the sides, of the tent. This lateral branch of the business, too, happened to be the wholesale part. My night customers took tea by the half-chest, and sugar by the bag, and were not particular about either price or payment. Then we got flooded out; that did not im- .... prove, matters. The butcher and ourselves, who represented the whole business community at the time, used to sleep behind the counter on an armful of manuka tops, nsed to kick them up behind the counter all day, and spread them at night. Then a fifty of flour in iieu of the orthodox feather pillow, and we rolled up in our blankets,lit our pipes,and snoozed. Jack ■ was always a great schemer ; always chose 'the low ground, because the mud was softest ; and that is the reason why on •' that particular night he first discovered that "the waters were out," or, rather, mr "The wafer's gathering right undee me," said he, about half-an-hour after V „, turned in. " Bale it out with your boot,' I answered,: thinking it was only a leak, and feeling' secure in my more elevated ; , position. But it was no laughing matter, ' and before he had his boots on, I had to rise. And so rapid was the rise of the water that we had scarcely time to get the canoe hauled up before the goods were floating in the store. We got in what we could— not forgetting the keg, you bet— and then split open the back of the tent, ran the canoe right through and tied her np to a sapling at the back. It was a situation that a /Mark Tapley might have come.out strong hv— flitting in the darkness and pouring rain, listening to the flood rushing all round tearing away the banks of the- creek and scrub in our immediate neighborhood, and expecting every moment that the sapling we were fast to would carry away, and we should be compelled to start on a voyage, without a course laid out, or a destination decided on ! The canoe rose with the flood until it bunt the hold the tent had to the ground ; but fortunately we were out of the current, and so we floated safely until daylight. Then we refreshed on brandy and biscuit ; rode out that day and the following night ; and the second day, by noon, we had backed out the . canoe and opened the establishment. When; .some months afterwards, Mr Blackett came from Nelson to survey a site for a township, I related my experience, and suggested thathigher groundshouldbe chosen. He thanked me, and said my intimation should have due weight. I apprehend it did, for, like all weighty matters, it fell to the ground. Yet subsequent events proved beyond a doubt the truth of the old adage that wisdom sometimes issues from the mouth of a fool— for, had my advice been followed, roofs would never have been broken to rescue women and children, and many a bitter heart-ache for the loss of property might have been spared. "Bat yet I ran before my horse to market/ So let us try back to the opening of the store. Well, after we had worked out the flood, we .dropped on to a patch of famine. The solitary policeman stationed at Blaketown sold bis surplus rations at seventy shillings per hundred, at the camp. L 75 Sr ton was the price of flour for a few ys, and difficult to obtain at that price. And this is how we fared at the TwelveMile landing :— For the first day or two, men who came down the creek for rations returned with a few pounds of oatmeal or rice instead of flour. That did not last long, and they then came down and camped in the neighborhood of the store, waiting the arrival of the boat. I had sent the canoe down to the port in charge of two men, to hurry up the goods, but the weather was very unfavorable, and every day showed an increase in the number of my neighbors, and a corresponding decrease in the quantify of everything that was eatable. < The first day or two the keg was in good order, and scarcity of solids was for£o r tten in the plentitude of the potations indulged in ; and the consequence was much fight ; in short, the sole amusement of the , miners for the first three days seemed to be fighting at night, and searching for their clothes in the morning. The latter task was commonly performed with sluice forks, for the mud round tho camps averaged eighteen inches in depth,' and the missing garments generally got' well trodden in. > But the whisky gave out on the third day, and then things began to get, serious. Parties were formed for shooting pigeons ; and snaring Maori hens ; and only, that these birds were plentiful it would Save! been rough on us. There were forty or fifty men living on birds for five days, wild fowl roast, boiled, and fried, being the sole item of the bill of fare. At length the boat (for there was only . one carrying cargo at the time on the river) was espied about Rundown, and

she did not make tho, landing until afte dark. Of course a rush tofthe waters edge, took place, and the boatman very wisely stood off and asked for me. I proposed that he should moor to the opposite bank until daylight, which proposition did not at all please the hungry crowd. It was wonderful the amonnt of cursing they did, considering their limited numbers ; but, finding their, threats nothing availed, they next tried persuasion, and appealed to my humanity. Some men that I knew resolved themselves 1 into a body of special constables, and guaranteed to. see all that left the boat safely dej livered inside the tent£ so in a soft moment I consented to .the cargo being delivered. The night was dark, and the men were hungry.- ~ "The constables, to their honor be it written, paid for, the flour they took themselves ; and, altogether I received payment' for height hundred and fifty of the ton of flour supposed to have been delivered. The recipients of the other twelve hundred and a-halt must have been very anxious to get back to their claims, for they started before daylight, and I saw them no more. Storekeeping did hot suit me ; so one fine morning I rolled up my blankets, shouldered the long-handled shovel, and bade adieu to the Twelve-Mile ; having gained a deal more experience than cash by my storekeeping spell. But, as there was plenty of ground, and as a pound a day was , not considered payable, it did not take long to retrieve my shattered fortunes. My wanderings in search of the "bright yellow gold—so heavy to get, so light to hold," took me over the greater part of the Grey Vfclley ; and it Was twelve or eighteen months before I again visited the Coast; and then Greymouth had reached the meridian of its glory, and hasted to its Bottling, amid the dense clouds of humdrum conventionalism that now envelope it (N.B. — Poetical flights like the foregoing sentence will be charged as extras.) You give Greymouth theatricals very favorable notices now. They required nothing of the kind when Kil. opened his theatre in the good old days. Those were the days of the legitimate drama -—five act tragedies and sidesplitting farce^. Hypercritics found fault with the scenery and machinery ; but with very little reason^ If tho half of the forest scene resolutely refused to move off, it certainly fitted the quota of the interior of the cottage very nicely, and when the enraged and injured peasant snatched the gun to rid the world of a villain, who had " brought mi-scry to his umble ome," it mattered little whether he found the weapon hanging to the wall, or Whether it was handed to him from between the trees. The price of admission was heavy ; I once escorted two lady friends, and only received two shillings change out of a pound ; but bless you, the entertainment was worth the money. In the first place, whenever I visit a theatre, I always sit near the side ; you see., so much more for your money— your range of vision is not hemmed in by the wings— 'and on this particular evening my sagacity was rewarded by a full view of the lines that shifted the drop-curtain, and also by a brilliant rainbow Of colours left by the painter's brush. . It as a pity I cannot remember the name of the : piece. The dialogue was smooth, the prompter needless, for every pause was ably filled in by pertinent remarks from the boatmen who formed the greater part of the audience — which introduced a nautical element into the drama that, possibly, its writer never intended it to possess. For instance, agitated parent, to nurse who has evidently just left a sick room somewhere:— "How did you leave your mistress ?" Nurse, at a loss for a reply. Boatman cuts in — " She'd .got her nose under water, and she'd a bin broadside on to a snag in arf a minit, if I hadn't let the starn swing round," &c.— and so on through the scene. But when the lovers put in an appearance,

the interest in the play became more con.centratecl, and the garrulous boatman was advised to dry up if he did not want a drive in the mouth that would make his teeih chatter ; and the threat quieted the party to whom it was addressed for nearly five minutes, and we were allowed to listen to the players. And the scene was worthy our undivided attention. The young gentleman was endeavoring to persuade his fair companion to consent to an immediate elopement. The chief inducement brought forward seemed to be the unqualified tempestuousness of the night, and the peculiar danger and roughness of the road. The lady hesitated. To put it in her own phrase, "While inclination bids me fly, stern duty bids me stay," and how the struggle, uninterrupted, might have ended, it is hard to say. But at this juncture our nautical friend cut in, by commencing a song at the top of his voice. The first line of which runs: — "Oh go it while you're young." This evidently convinced the lady, for she threw herself into her lover's arms and wept. Here, en passant, why do stage lovers always elope on stormy nights; the gentlemen arrayed in lambswool lights ; the ladies in low necked dresses? What horrid colds they must wake up with the next morning. The very thought of the thing makeß me sneeze— and so impressed is my mind with this idea, that I never see a scene ef this description without haying recourse to my pocket-handker-chief, not to weep for the parent's agony, or the children's sin, but to blow, my nose. Talking, of agony; the afflicted parent in the scene following the one I have attempted to describe "piled it up some ;" but even ihis nothing daunted the irrepressible boatman, who, when the old gentleman drew his sword, and called upon heaven to strengthen his arum, declared that himself and his weapon were a couple of rusty old blades,, and advised an adjournment to the grindstone. Then the father went in pursuit ; and, by virture of my position, I am now enabled to state— a fact never before divulged — the runaway couple were overtaken close to the paint stripes herein-before described, and, instead of striking the betrayer of his daughter's innocence to the earth, the afflicted father assisted him to , shift the scenes. . . - By this time my lady friends signified their intention of giving the thing best : and we left the theatre. When next I entered it the stage was strewed with goods rescued from the. late fire, and now it is a tramway station. And the bars, and the, presiding goddesses therein. How unlike the dull present ! The barmaids of the present time always seem to be acting in the role of Marianna in the Moated Grange, and I can imagine them constantly sighing — "Oh, I'm weary, weary, weary, Trade's so very dead." Not so the maidens of five years since. There was no "Yes, sir," and " No, sir," about them. In five minntes and a quarter they knew where you where working, and called you by your Christian name. Bless their bright eyes, they were not too proud to join you, and proposed champagne in suph a natural manner. Why, one would think that they had been reared in a champagne country, and had never condescended to imbibe any meaner tipple. Let me bring my sketch to a close ; alike futile are pen and pencil to pourtray the glorious scenes of those good old times. How often they return in dreams. How often it is misery to wake and find them shadows that have vanished.