[Pages 210-234]
[Image of page 210]
Wet to the Saddle,
We were branching about at a station rather more than eighty miles from the Bracken Hills, making preparations to drive sheep inland to stock them; and at this time I find in my note-book:
Dec. 22. --"Yesterday and day before, C. rode a hundred miles to get sheep-dogs, and B. and self as many more, hunting for lost cattle broken away from the Pass run, and supposed to be in the neighbourhood. To-day all three started early together, separating about ten miles out, -- B. (who does not join us in the sheep-drive) to continue the cattle-hunting for a week; and C. and self forty miles to get bullock-team and dray. Towards noon, on our return, wind suddenly shifted, and a positive wall of storm and rain drove up from the sou'-west. We could see it coming ten miles away, but there wasn't a stick of shelter near. It swept up over the country at express speed, and caught us on the top of some rising ground, the rain beating in heavy driving sheets, and the wind tearing by as if seeking for something to blow to pieces. In five minutes we were drenched. The horses twisted and winced before it, and doubled their heads back to the saddle-
[Image of page 211]
flaps; but there was only one thing to be done, -- to push them through it, and get in at all risks. The best we could do, for nearly ten miles, was to get out of them a sort of broken crab-like trot, for the lines of rain hit them in the eyes like whips, and they couldn't face it. But the route turning sharp away from the storm, we raced over the last five miles at a dead gallop, dismounting on the lee-side of the station-house, infinitely wetter, I am convinced, than it is possible to make any man by hauling him through a river. Half-an-hour afterwards, a large bay horse dashed up, bearing B., whom we had left on the ranges for good; but he had made a circle of his day's work, and finding himself, when the storm broke, within ten miles of the morning's start, he had pushed back over broken country, and got in, --a living water-sheet."
Out of justice to the climate, I am bound to add that the next morning brought a bright beautiful day, with a clear air, unsurpassed, I believe, in any country in the world.
Again, a week later on the drive, I find:
Dec. 28. "Got up from the ground by daybreak and let the sheep break camp at once.
"Shortly after, rain came on, --hard, --and then harder, --then much harder, --falling steadily in spouts, without wind, and so continued all day. We sat in our saddles literally streaming, and moved on slowly, hour after hour, behind the flock the clouds
[Image of page 212]
settling down lower and lower over the sides of the valley through which we were driving. Towards evening, rain gradually ceased and gave us happily a fine night. Pushed the sheep against the bank of a deep stream, and camped with a single watch, -- wringing ourselves out, and doing the best we could to change, with the few appliances we had upon the pack-horse."
With the exception of the two drenchings I have named, we had a time of splendid weather; --in fact, just that cheering, exhilarating climate which, over hundreds of miles of her less elevated country, New Zealand gives in unstinted plenty.
Half-and-Half.
Shortly after getting the necessary sheep upon this run, (the Bracken Hills), C. and B., another friend, and the inevitable "I," started from it, hoping to reach that night, by a ride of fifty miles, an up-country way-side inn which, in the advance of civilisation, we understood had been lately put up by an
[Image of page 213]
enterprising and very respectable newly-married couple. We rode lightly equipped to save our horses, and without any preparations for camping, and arrived about two hours after sundown, on a rather threatening evening, at the end of our day's journey. There stood an extremely small hut, quite new to us, but a shelter for the night, and that was all we wanted.
As a matter of course, and without going up to it, we tethered out our horses, and advanced to the hut, saddles in hand. Inside the door, in the fire-light, stood an exceedingly nice-looking person, the flickering flames on the hearth lighting up her face, and showing a pleasing, hospitable smile, mixed withal with an expression of uncertainty and bewilderment. The three friends who were with me, by some mutually understood arrangement between themselves, managed to present me first at the doorway of the hut. Whether they did this ironically as meaning that by rights I should be last, or whether they saw any particularly keen joke in it which I failed at the moment to perceive, I did not make out; but, however this may have been, they tipped me first over the door-step of the hut, assisting in the delicate position in which they had placed me by allowing a slight sound of incompletely subdued laughter to find its way through the hut-door, and form a sort of distant accompaniment to the few enquiries it was necessary to make. From these I
[Image of page 214]
ascertained that the husband and bridegroom of the fair individual I was addressing was absent at the coast, and would not be back at the earliest "till the day after to-morrow."
Now please clearly understand the nature of our position. It was late, and dark, and beginning to rain; and we were in no way prepared to camp out, as we had left home relying upon shelter. The hut was just large enough to contain a bed which exactly filled half of it; the remainder of the space, --floored by the bare ground, --merely giving room to move about before the hearth.
We stood aghast, and so did our unexpectedly solitary hostess. But for the unfortunate circumstance that she was, as I have said, so very good-looking, it did appear to me that all would have been well: but this disastrous fact seemed to overwhelm the situation with entanglements. Meanwhile we were standing half in and half out of the hut, getting wetter and wetter; neither ourselves nor the good-looking difficulty seeing any way out of the dilemma; as, notwithstanding our expressed determination to remain all night outside in the wet, rather than disturb our hostess in the possession of her room, she was equally determined we should not do so.
At last a compromise was proposed from the inside, and accepted by the dripping quartette on the outside. The terms were as follow:
Clause No. 1. --Dripping travellers to retire, vanish,
[Image of page 215]
in fact be altogether non-existant, for twenty minutes.
Clause No. 2. --Good-looking difficulty personally, actually and spiritually to abandon, depart, and disappear from the space of the hut before the fireplace, within that time.
Clause No. 3. --At the expiration of the armistice-dripping travellers to return, and take full possession of the one half the hut in front of the fire-place.
These terms mutually ratified and agreed upon, we vanished; and returning at the end of the stipulated time, sang "Row, brothers, row," and "See our oars with feathered spray " (two new melodies only just then arrived in the colony) in the place of ringing the bell, and then in a body entered the principalities.
All was silent. --The flicker of the fire dimly lighted up the hut, --the curtain of the bed was drawn, -- and the floor empty for our possession.
Silently we all lay down, covering the entire space of the floor; C.'s feet and mine pretty nearly in the fire, and the tops of the other men's heads grinding against the opposite wall. The fire gave out a few expiring sparks, lighted the scene with one last glimmer, and left us to sleep in darkness, and breathe the fresh air, which blew in freely through the thin roof, till morning.
At break of day we rose, --left the hut, --shifted and watered our horses, --and in half-an-hour the hospitable difficulty, now a difficulty no longer, had a
[Image of page 216]
rough breakfast laid out for us on a box in the middle of the floor. By seven o'clock we had saddled our horses, tendered our poor thanks to our hospitable and modest hostess, --assuring her that they were altogether unequal to her deserts, --and without looking back, departed all together, the morning sun just rising over the ranges and lighting up the wet hill-sides as we went.
Fire! --and a Chop.
THE owner of a run, whose centre was about twenty miles from our station on the Bracken Hills, had fitted up a rough out-station at our front and his back boundary, and not more than three miles from our house. Early in the next Autumn all the hands he had with him were out on the hills, camping at night and mustering sheep by day, the owner being left alone in the house.
One fine Sunday morning we were taking it calmly in the rough verandah of our house, when suddenly a blue pillar of smoke rose thickly up from the hut in the distance, and rolled away before the wind:
[Image of page 217]
almost instantly it broke into bright red flames along the roof, and the house was unmistakably on fire. B. instantly mounted a tethered horse we had at hand, and galloped eight or ten of the other horses--fortunately close by--into the stock-yard. We flung on our saddles, jumped into them, and went down over the mile or two between us and the burning house at a hard gallop. Volumes of smoke kept rolling up, with bright lines of fire at the base, and as we got closer, the rafters of the roof stood out like black bones among the flames. Still we could not see a soul moving, and knowing that the owner had slept there, we began to fear what might have befallen him.
The horses thundered over the ground at fire-engine pace, as if they knew there was something wrong. Closer we got, and closer, --still no one was to be seen: --surely Walker might have waked in time to get away!
We were already on the outer edge of the smoke, and could hear the crashing and hissing of the fire, and twisting at full pace sharply round the corner of a low fence, we dashed up to the house. It was in full blaze; only the bones of the building discernible, and a great roaring bonfire flaring far above our heads into the air. A confused litter of goods and chattels were flung out in confusion on the ground, and in front of the whole, on a rude bench, sat the sole inhabitant of the place.
[Image of page 218]
Throwing ourselves from our horses, we dashed up to him, calling out: "Good heavens! Walker, what on earth can be done?"--to which his whole and sole reply was: "My dear fellow, allow me to offer you a chop!"
Now of course it's a very liberal and very hospitable thing for any man to do, to offer any other man a mutton chop, --but when the one man's house is burning to the ground before his eyes, and the other men rush up breathless to the rescue, it is, to say the least of it, a slightly novel and peculiar proceeding on the part of the owner to ignore the fire and introduce refreshments.
In this irresistible mixture of the disastrous and the comic, however, the conduct of the chief actor, the man on the bench, was, as it proved, by no means so extraordinary. --He told us as follows:
The roof of his house was low and thatched: that morning he was cooking some chops in a frying-pan; the grilling contents caught fire; his eyes besmoked and dim, he backed, frying-pan in hand, out of the door, and landed the pan in a place of safety on the ground; but in passing out, the flame, --unseen by him, --had for an instant licked the inner thatch: --as he stood a few paces from the hut he heard a roar behind him, and on turning round, smoke was pouring through the door, fire already leaping along the roof, and the house rapidly burning down. He rushed in, threw through the
[Inserted unpaginated illustration]
[Image of page 219]
window everything he came to, --bedding, and plates (all tin), and pots, and pans, and stools, his gun, and powder, sugar, flour, and tea, --chopped the legs off his table and kicked that out after the rest, and finally seizing his tea-kettle, escaped, smoked and singed, into the open air.
Seeing then that all attempt at checking the fire was utterly hopeless, he proceeded to do the only thing that remained, --he simply sat down in front of the fire, and calmly resumed his interrupted breakfast. And at this phase of the affair he had arrived when we galloped up. He was sitting, perfectly collected, and as cool as a morning cucumber, taking a pot of tea, and calmly surveying the scene. He had at his feet his frying-pan with two hot mutton chops in it, and he was eating a third with a pocket-knife, with a damper on his knees as a plate.
It may seem utterly absurd, but we actually sat down on the ground, and as the burning hut subsided into a white hot furnace of ashes, we joined him in a friendly pot of tea and slice of festive damper.
Three hours later we brought down a horse-dray, and took him and all his remaining goods and chattels to our house. The next day his men returned, and the next he and they, with the mustered sheep, left for good for his front boundary.
The hut was never rebuilt, but weeds and rank grass overgrew the site, till it could be traced by the eye no longer.
[Image of page 220]
Hard Lines,
A MOST extraordinary and intensely severe winter had caused great difficulty with the sheep, even in the comparatively mild district of the Pass, and we continued under great anxiety as to how C., who was stationed at the Bracken Hills, would get through the winter upon the higher and bleaker country. At last, when signs of the breaking up of the severity of the weather began to show themselves, a rider on a very starved horse rode slowly up, one mid-day, to our wool-shed. We were out on the hills when he came, but he waited three hours and rested, and then left, leaving a note which we found on our return. The rider (the grandson of an old French Marquis) was one of the two hands, both friends, whom C. had with him. After having been shut in by snow for six weeks, he had, two days before, --without question at risk of his life, --broken out through with the note he left. The note was from C, and said:
"Dear M., I am almost worn out, and must have help at once. If things don't change there can only be one end to it all. Lebrandt takes this; he has
[Image of page 221]
been a deuced good fellow. Come yourselves, if you can by any means."
That was all, --but we were quite well aware what it meant. We had met hard times enough with him to know that he never flinched at trifles. He had clearly been shut in for the worst of the winter-unable to get out through the snow; and what had been happening to the sheep, meanwhile, it was not difficult to guess.
We found and yarded our horses that night, and by daylight next morning started to his help. The run was about fifty miles off, the country for the last twenty gradually rising in elevation. As we neared, great stretches of table-land appeared, laden and smooth with snow, and the higher ranges were white without a break. We got on slowly, a bleak wind coming down from the mountains, and making the evening air very cutting. Towards sundown we had mountains nearly nine thousand feet high on our left hand, and had reached the lower end of the only level country on the run; an hour afterwards we rode up through deep, thawing snow to the small house of the station.
At the snow-cumbered doorway stood C. and the two friends I have named, just in from the run, and all looking harassed and worn. We dismounted silently, and silently shook old C.'s hand, for we could see that--good fellow and strong-hearted as ten years had proved him--he was on the edge now of being sorely broken down.
[Image of page 222]
By the fire that night he told us all; how that, partly from want of knowledge of the winter-requirements of an untried run, he had kept the sheep on a portion of it which proved unfitted for the time; how a heavy, deepening fall of snow had fixed them there, --as he supposed only for a few days; and how another fall, without thaw between, had finally prevented him, during the unheard-of, bitter weather which followed, from getting them on to warmer and safer facings of the run. He had gone out, he said, day after day, for weeks, in all weather, to the flock, and used desperate efforts to move them on to feed; but he had almost entirely failed, --and he had to give it up, and see them die; and he gave us the number lost, and it was a loss which fell heavily upon him and us (for we were none of us rich), but the long anxiety of gradually seeing every effort fail had told upon him tenfold. Hard times (even when he has fought his best through them) bear down upon a man with a heaviness which cannot be mistaken, and old C. stooped under it then. He did not say much more, but I could see, as he sat in the fire-light, that he was nearly tired out, and we knew, without his telling us, what he had had to bear, and how he had fought hard, and striven his all.
The next morning, in a body, we went out to the flock, --and about two miles from the house, in a hollow of the mountain, there they were. I must not tell the reader all we saw, but it was very rue-
[Image of page 223]
ful, and heavy as it was, was doubly heavy, because it fell so sorely upon a friend.
Though wild before, and strong as chamois, the sheep that were left stood now, weak and faint with misery, eyeing us with sad hollow eyes, or feebly gnawing at the coarse tussock-tops which the thaw began at last to give up through the trampled snow. It was a sad and wild sight to see; but it would not do to lament it there, so we cheered old C. as best we could, and kept the sheep moving and feeding; and a warm nor'west wind springing up that very day, the snow sank down rapidly, and in three days after we came, every remaining sheep was safe for good.
After this dear experience, the run was worked with the success of better knowledge, and is now a valuable addition to a front station. C., too, who will now bid the reader farewell, is living on a freehold farm--well planted, in a warm valley--with his own house, and his own fire-side, and a wife to brighten it at the day's end.
P.S. --Also olive branches.
[Image of page 224]
Just a Word.
ON the discovery and occupation of this fourth run, and after not a few years of hard days and many scores of night-campings on the ground, quieter times followed; and though for nearly two years afterwards (from the long distances between our stations) we lived, like many other squatters, perpetually in the saddle, yet the actual exploring experiences (a few of which I have tried to picture to the reader) were over; and as time passed, and gave the run-holders power to smooth them away, the roughings and the campings gradually ceased, and the life bettered every day, and brought to many of the early settlers the reward which, if he will but wait undiscouraged, will come to the colonist in every new country.
The settlement, now in the twenty-fourth year of its occupation, has grown into a civilised and pleasant colony. Where travelling sheep were watched by night, there runs now over the plains a well-appointed line of Railway, and six-horse coaches do their hundred miles in the day. Within a stone's throw of our first Robinson Crusoe camp a railway
[Image of page 225]
passes, running right across the plain, and giving two convenient stations to the neighbourhood; and where a few huts apologised for the absence of a city, a large and healthy town has gradually risen: and though checked somewhat by the cost of the native war, --with which she had nothing on earth to do, --and which is now happily at an end, --the Southern Island of New Zealand has still, I believe, under Providence, many years of prosperous days before her.
The Province of Canterbury has for its capital, as I have said, the town or city of Christchurch, -- city it should be, for it is the residence of the Bishop of the diocese, and in its midst the foundations of a church are laid in which the Bishop's throne is to be placed, and which the colonists hope may be worthy the name of Cathedral.
The streets of the town are all wide and open, with broad pavements; and the shops are verandah'd along nearly the whole line. Every conceivable thing to be had in England can be had there; in the department of the practical, from a saucepan to a steam-engine; and especially in the matter of raiment and apparel is the choice multitudinous, and every intermediate "sweet thing" in things is obtainable, from a gauzy nothing up to a "Moire Antique" anything.
There is much more going on in the city at all times than in an English town of the same size;
[Image of page 226]
and of an afternoon, English-built carriages, well-horsed and well-appointed, drive in from a circle of ten miles beyond.
Among other special signs which mark the gradual introduction of all old social institutions in new countries, there is one I must be sure to record; and though a ball in itself may not be a very noble harbinger, yet when its first wax tapers are lit, and its first quadrille opened in a new piece of the world, it has a meaning beyond the quadrille, and an influence after the tapers have burnt out.
The influence which it and many other things like it have--is simply that they civilise.
I recall well the first ball which was given, twenty-one years ago, on the before wild plains at the back of Port Cooper, and which first sent the strains of London waltzes out into the astonished New Zealand moonlight. The music, I remember, was very good, but it was a ball without splendour, and was simple even to simplicity; and only the morning before, a member of its committee came into a shop where I happened to be, and borrowed an axe-head wherewith to scrape the floor, because a few days previously some tons of sugar-bags had been stored upon it. But the ball was not a whit the worse, and that very member of committee is now a member of the Ministry at Wellington, (the capital of the whole colony) and advises the Sir George Grey of the day, and attends levees, and has a staff of office, and holds a
[Image of page 227]
portfolio, and does all kinds of distinguished things, and has the title of Honorable dove-tailed on (so that you can't see the joining) to the left-hand corner of his name.
Many, many balls have followed since that one, and many other civilisations have followed in its wake. A man now, who comes from up the country, finds that he has to wear the latest collar; that he must rake from the bottom of his portmanteau his disused card-case; that he must recover his small-talk; recognise his invitations by an afternoon call; and last, but not least, acquire the art of croquet; for long ago the rattle of wooden mallets was heard over the lawn hedges, and the repeated call for some inattentive "green" or otherwise-engaged "Number two blue" echoed in the afternoon shade.
Evening parties, too, are not wanting, and are at times, I believe, just as eminently and successfully slow as, to my surprise, I am told they sometimes are even here in England. When I last left the colony, too, I remember, among countless messages, being told to tell someone at home that a visible decrease could be noticed in the previously extended characteristics of the lady-apparel of the period; and very shortly after, I was informed that some certain sort of black velvet jacket, and fully described but all indescribable bonnet had entered an appearance, and that very good specimens of men in "Edinburgh" collars and "Kron-Prinz" hats might
[Image of page 228]
be met with on sunny afternoons, and now I am told that even these signs of the times have disappeared, and new ones have replaced them; and I believe, (so closely does the new world in these days of steam and telegraph tread upon the heels of the old), that these colonists, --these people who live directly down below this old England somewhere, who, while we are eating our evening dinner, are actively engaged in getting up, and for whom a thousand breakfast-cups are being mingled and outpoured, --though standing feet to feet with us are, in their social signs and orderings, little more than three months behind ourselves, even though a couple of oceans do roll their waves between us.
On the sea-board side of the ranges, at the back of our first camp, is the harbour of the colony, Port Victoria, and to get at the water's edge from the interior, a tunnel has been driven directly through the range; and I believe I am right in saying that, next to that bored under Mont Cenis, it is the longest which has anywhere been driven without a shaft, --for the height of the hills above it (fifteen and seventeen hundred feet from the base) entirely prevents the use of shafts, so that the whole line has to be completed, through solid rock, from two facings only; this of course greatly lengthens the time, and adds to the expense of the work, especially the former, as when two or three shafts can be sunk, six or
[Image of page 229]
eight facings can be worked at instead of only two.
After some years of patience and perseverance and at great cost and labour, a passage has at last been forced, and the settlers, who for fifteen years climbed and toiled over and round it, pass now smoothly under the root of this obstinate barrier; and for the first time since the islands were lifted above the sea, a locomotive sends its screaming echoes into the dark heart of a South Pacific mountain.
On the west coast of the Southern Island large gold fields have latterly been opened up; and it is a curious fact that on the west side only of the backbone range of the island is the precious yellow treasure scattered. For many miles along the west coast a good deal of small gold has been washed out of the sand on the sea-beach; and the fields generally, though not yielding great golden prizes, have established themselves as good working-men's fields; -- that is to say, a steady man, who knows his trade, can almost always rely upon making very large wages; and this class of field has been found to be much more profitable to a colony than others more brilliant but less lasting. A man, to be a good digger, must, for a time, learn how to be one; for gold-digging has become quite a recognised and separate department of labour, and the gold-digger of the present day is, as a rule, a comparatively respectable, quiet man, hard-working, and used to
[Image of page 230]
rough life, but belonging quite as much to a separate profession as does a blacksmith or a miner.
These fields--or reefs, as they are called--are at present worked by many thousands of diggers, and for some years have yielded several hundred thousand pounds' worth of gold annually, and still promise well for the future.
As a branch fact (not quite, but very nearly a propos of gold) I will just add that, not long ago, a lucky unlucky man picked up a stone among the ranges in the Canterbury province, which he sold, thinking himself fortunate, for a pound; --the buyer, thinking himself lucky, sold it in Melbourne for a hundred pounds; --the last purchaser (and it is impossible to refuse the conviction that he at least was a lucky man) finds himself the possessor of a diamond valued at considerably over seven thousand pounds.
It is said that the first man is walking about looking for another. I can only say (and in this I have no doubt he would cordially join me) that I very sincerely "wish he may get it."
[Image of page 231]
The Last Crust.
IF in the notes which have gone before I have dwelt somewhat more upon the rough than upon the pleasant side of colonisation, it is not because there are not pleasant colorings in the picture. I have told rather more of the hardships of the life, because my fellow explorers and myself happen to have pushed to the extreme edge of the occupiable country.
But in forming a judgment of the actual merits of the colony as a home, the hardships must not be over estimated, for as the early, ruder days pass, (especially in the milder districts of the settlement,) they are rendered harmless by precaution, or altogether disappear.
A bracing climate an Englishman needs; and hard frosts at night hurt no man who has a shelter and a fire-side; and autumn winds and rain will not cramp him if he can rest under his own roof-tree at the day's end. Among the difficulties too come many pleasant times, but they do not come at first; -- and gains worth gaining, but they must be won; -- not the least of these, the satisfaction of looking back, from better days, upon hard times that have come and gone before.
[Image of page 232]
I have not ventured, in what I have said, to enter at length into the drier practical details of emigration, for this has been by no means my object in the present work; it is enough, perhaps, for me to say, that although unexpected misfortune may befall men everywhere, and is not absent there, yet for almost all steady, patient colonists (for patience is the great colonial virtue), colonial life can be made a success. There is in it no patent, royal road to fortune, but time and determination will lead up to a point where, if a man will but be contented, he may be thoroughly content. And though he may not stand upon the very ground of his native country, yet at least he will live amongst his fellow-countrymen; and even if at times he feels inclined to regret for the pleasant places at home, he may recollect that life, even in the old country, is not altogether clear of difficulties, and (not forgetting higher authority) may remember how old Shakespeare has told us that
"All places that the eye of Heaven visits,
Are to a wise man ports and happy havens. "
And here, with full thanks to any reader who may have followed them so far, I close these glimpses of a settler's life; adding only two words more; -- one to those who (living here in England) may have friends away, so that the writing of their pens is all they see of the absent ones for years. Do not let it be thought (even if tidings from those who are so far do sometimes come but tardily) that distance has
[Image of page 233]
faded out the home picture they carry in their memory. To all true colonists it does not fade: they remember, --and whatever fortune may befall them there, keep still an inner corner of their hearts for the old places, and the old friends.
I have been sometimes asked whether colonists do lead pleasant lives beyond the sea. This is a difficult question to answer, because a pleasant life is so difficult a thing to find. This I do know, -- that I have not met more happy people here than there: certain am I that I have met there fewer miserable people by many: and I believe I am true in saying that there is there a more general average of happiness. It is a happiness to look back from better days upon hard times that have gone before, and it is a happiness to gain what every colonist may gain, --for every steady colonist may look forward to winning at length for himself a fire-side and a home-roof of his own; and there is no hired hearth so lighted-up as the one his own labour will gain, nor any roof-tree so dear as the one his own hands have raised, and over which gone-by storms have beaten. And his home once gained, though his day's work may still be rough and hard at times, yet, having a sure evening welcome, his roughings fall upon him lightly, for again he recalls old Shakespeare's tonic bidding:
"The sullen passage of thy weary steps
Esteem a foil, wherein thou art to set
The precious jewel of thy home-return."
[Image of page 234]
One word more, as last of all. If any one choose a settler's life, --no matter where, --never let him go, dreaming of success to be had for the wishing. Hardships at first are sure to meet him, and difficulties will rise up at times and cloud about the way in front he thought was clear; --still, if he will but let patience hold up his heart, a better time (never so far off as fear would make it) will come up and reward him for his hard days, and give him a home which he may love there, or perchance, if he wish it, bring him back to his native country again.
And if it does so happen that anyone who has read these few records should push his way out into the New World, and he and I should chance to meet at the Antipodes, if he will remind me of these notes, I will lend him what little help I can for the sake of the old times they tell of, and because he has thought it worth his while to read them.
FINIS.
