‘Don’t you see what you would be? You’d be a knobstick. You'd be taking less wages than the other labourers—all for the sake of another man’s children. Think how you’d abuse any poor fellow who was willing to take what he could get to keep his own children. You and your Union would soon be down upon him […] ’

Over supper the minister did unbend a little into one or two ponderous jokes.

Now we passed through a grove of palms, with their long bare stems and their feathery tufts lying motionless in the air; now through a forest of acacias and nabks; now along the edge of a deep canal, and then through fields of greenest corn […]

[…] there were always some wretched musicians, with an old fiddle, an old clarinet, and an old verdigrised brass bugle[…]