in these new countries. It produces, first of all, a
low form of chronic dyspepsia, whose effect is immediately perceived in
early decay of the teeth. It often seriously affects the great
organs--the liver, kidneys, stomach, and heart--predisposing them to
derangement, and aiding the progress of organic mischief in them, should
that arise from other causes. It affects the nerves, causing
irritability and debility in them. Nervous power becomes impaired,
reacting with evil effect upon the ganglionic centres and the brain.
Hence the mind must become insidiously affected also. I am quite sure
that the character of our colonists is being modified by their practice
of excessive tea-drinking, and I cannot believe that the change will be
for the better. I believe that we may trace to tea, gloominess,
misanthropy, loss of cheerfulness, a restless energy without fixity of
purpose, a sour temper, a morbid and abnormal simplicity, leading to
intellectual retrogression instead of progress, and to a tendency to
yield to superstitious fancies, with loss of control over reason and its
advancement. What will be the future of these young tea-drowned
nations?"

Fortunately, we only understood a fraction of this tirade, yet we
trembled and shivered ever afterwards as we drank our tea.
Then the doctor showed us how to make sugar-beer, treacle-beer,
cabbage-tree-root-beer, honey-beer, peach-cider, corn-cider, and various
other drinks of a more or less unlicensed kind. So now we have usually
something else to quaff besides tea. Peaches we have in any quantity;
and the cider they make is capital stuff. Honey abounds in every hollow
tree; and the mead or metheglin we compound is a fine drink.

Flour and meal we have to buy. By-and-by there will be a flour-mill at
the township, for already some of the more forward settlers near are
growing wheat. Maize we do not use ourselves, except as a green
vegetable. Some people grind it and use the meal for cakes, but we
principally turn it into pig-meat or fowl-flesh.

Our garden department, though not always so well managed as it might be,
yet adds largely to our food supply. The principal crops are potatoes,
kumera (sweet potatoes), and pumpkins; good substantial food that will
keep, and, should we have a surplus, will sell. We don't bother with
green vegetables; they don't pay, we think, and boiled green maize-cobs
suffice us for that class of thing. But, in such seasons as it has
occurred to any o