Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/39

Towards the end of our voyage, when everybody was getting into high spirits, and even our poor Scotchwoman was cheering up, the emigrants, married and single, gave a tea-party, by permission of the captain, to which he and the doctor and the cabin passengers received a ceremonious invitation, indited on a note of pink paper by the best penwoman of the steerage. The tables were supplied solely with what the givers of the feast had been saving for three days beforehand from their allowances. We had no sooner descended into the steerage, which served as reception and tea-room, than the Yorkshire woman came up and asked us for a sixpence, not to "pay our footing," as might have been supposed, but for insertion in a fortune-telling cake, wherein a ring and a thimble had been already hidden, and nothing but a piece of silver was wanting to complete the equipment of the oracle. As neither of us had any coin smaller than a shilling about us, it was lucky that the larger piece of money would answer as well as the sixpence, and three of the company were thus enabled to learn their future fortunes to a nicety. There had been a great deal of rivalry displayed that day in cake-making, but this stroke of imagination at once decided the votes in favour of the one produced by the Yorkshire woman. Possibly, however, the opportunity that had been afforded to the single persons of prying into their destiny caused the intrinsic merits of some of the other cakes to be overlooked, just as one sees, in the every-day affairs of life, the claims of modest merit passed by in order to bestow honour on a charlatan. This was the first and only soirée that I ever attended on the high seas, and, in a week