Crusts: A Settler's Fare due South.

Laurence James Kennaway

First published by Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle in 1874

Digitised and made available online by the University of Auckland Libraries and Learning Services.

Epub © 2013 Early New Zealand Books Collection

ISBN 978-1-927289-03-7

[TITLE PAGES]

[Inserted unpaginated illustration]

LAST DAY IN HARNESS.

CRUSTS.

A Settler's Fare due South.

BY
LAURENCE J. KENNAWAY.

LONDON:
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, LOW, & SEARLE,
CROWN BUILDINGS, 188, FLEET STREET.
1874.
[The right of Translation is reserved. ]

EXETER:

PRINTED BY JAMES TOWNSEND, GANDY STREET.

Reprint published by
CAPPER PRESS
CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND
1970

Printed offset by The Caxton Press, Christchurch

[DEDICATION]

THIS BOOK

TO

OLD FRIENDS,

IN RECORD OF HARD TIMES.

"FORSAN HAEC OLIM MEMINISSE JUVABIT."

AEneid i. 203.

[CONTENTS]

CONTENTS.

LOOK HERE!.... 5
MOREOVER..... 6
CHART..... 7
LANDING ON THE OTHER SIDE... 8
SUNRISE NUMBER ONE... 12
WILD DUCKS AND MUTUAL SOCKS. 20
SHINGLER'S BREAD... 21
THE NEW CHUM – HIS BED.. 24
FIRST CHURCH.... 25
THE BISHOP – HIS ROBES... 28
WASHERWOMAN – ALSO PAT... 30
CURFEW WITHOUT A BELL... 34
HOARFROST COVERLET ...35
ON THE ROAD ...44
NO BRIDGE.... 50
GOOD-BYE TO THE OLD HUT... 58
WINTER NIGHTS AND NO ROOF... 64
INTERVAL FOR REFRESHMENT... 73
SNARES AND TRAPS... 74
WHIFFLER..... 83
PLUS SNOW – MINUS FIRE... 87
PROLOGUE – SHORT... 93
A PECULIAR DREAM... 94
LAST DAY IN HARNESS... 104
COLD BISHOP.... 106
NO HOPE..... 108
THE BLACK EYES OF PARKER.. NO

WE CATCH IT... 111
HEXAMETERS – NOT WARRANTED... 115
SETTLING THE QUESTION WITH A LUCIFER MATCH... 129
BURKE'S PASS... 133
LAKE TEKAPO... 136
FIRE AGAINST FIRE... 140
GHOSTS OF LEGS OF MUTTON... 143
WE DO NOT SAVE OUR BACON... 149
LOOK OUT!... 157
OLD FRENCH... 165
LOST IN THE OPIHI... 168
LETTING 'EM HAVE IT... 172
IDEAL OF MOUNTAINS... 179
MOUNTAINS – REAL... 181
NO PERSONAL REFLECTIONS... 198
A STARLIGHT CAMP... 200
THE OLD HORSE AND THE NEW CHUM... 204
DOG'S LEG AND LOBSTER SALAD... 207
WET TO THE SADDLE... 210
HALF-AND-HALF... 212
FIRE! – AND A CHOP... 216
HARD LINES... 220
JUST A WORD... 224
THE LAST CRUST.... 231

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]

INDEX TO ILLUSTRATIONS.

LAST DAY IN HARNESS (Frontispiece) See 105
CHART..... 7
ON THE ROAD.... 47
GOOD-BYE TO THE OLD HUT... 62
SNARES AND TRAPS... 77
WHIFFLER – HIS DODGE... 86
PLUS SNOW – MINUS FIRE... 89
WE CATCH IT... 113
LOOK OUT!... 162
LETTING 'EM HAVE IT... 178
THE OLD HORSE AND THE NEW CHUM... 206
FIRE! – AND A CHOP... 219

Note. – It may interest the reader to know that the above Illustrations {taken from rough sketches by the author) are all the work of a young artist who is both deaf and dumb.

[Page 4 is blank]

[Pages 5-30]

Look Here.

THERE is no pretence whatever in these notes, to present the reader with English complete at all points.

Very often English complete at all points is a bore to the reader (who deserves all consideration), besides being an unmitigated worry to the author, to however little indulgence that unnecessary person may be entitled.

And in truth many of these notes were first roughly put together in wind-worried huts, or under the drifty shelter of dray-wheels – and however little there was in them of worth before, they would have been made altogether worthless, if diluted down into the smoothness of perfect grammar. So they are offered, like rough colts in a paddock,

"For what they are worth."

Moreover

I KNOW a friend who, if I print these notes, will come up to me and say: "Look here, why do you call that wretched book of yours, Crusts or Bread Crusts, or some such name? I don't see what it's got to do with either," – and I shall desire him to exercise those well-known and powerful intellectual faculties of his own in discovering: as I have an appointment which will prevent my having the pleasure of explaining. But I have no appointment which will prevent my saying a word or two to the reader – always courteous and always discreet – in interpretation.

The notes which follow are records of some very rough times which befel the writer some years since, in the middle Island of New Zealand, and are mainly pulled out of an old diary kept on the spot; being hard enough to call them with all reason "Crusts."

They are all bona fide experiences – quite uncoloured – and even if the reader took the trouble of giving them more attentive reading than they expect, they could by no means convey to him the unmitigated roughness of the settler's first years, in an interior where snow, and rain, and

[Inserted unpaginated illustration]

Chart of the present Province of Canterbury, New Zealand, as roughly known by the Settlers in 1853. Area about 17,000 Square Miles.
Mount Cook Range is crossed by about 170 East longitude, & 43. South Latitude.

hail turn out Autumn, and Summer, and sunshine, without notice and without ceremony.

Such hard days are the only fare served up to settlers and explorers whom fate billets on the bare hospitalities of an unfurnished country: and it took some tolerably strong mental ivories to deal with these crusts metaphorical, and get at the result beyond.

I hope that in following them, the reader will not find his intellectual palate too often disappointed, and himself going empty away.

Chart

THE adjoined Chart is in no respect meant to be a Map, in its geographical sense. It is simply intended to enable the reader to follow the accompanying notes with ease; the locality of each note being plainly marked.

It is purposely drawn roughly from memory, to represent the rude knowledge of the country, which was all the early explorers had to guide them.

In the main, however, the chief features of the colony are given with sufficient accuracy for the object desired.

Landing on the other Side.

ABOUT two and twenty years ago, in the September of 1851, a ship-load of first settlers arrived at the mouth of a great strange harbour, on the Eastern Coast of the middle Island of New Zealand. It was after a long weary voyage of one hundred and twenty-two days, and – what is not to be quite forgotten – just as many nights just as weary. Our weather-battered old ship had been caught in her share of wild weather, and the share of three other ships besides, and her prisoners, the crew and passengers, had not sighted as much land as would serve to stand a flower-pot upon or to grow a geranium.

We were tired of the ship, tired of the voyage, and insufferably tired of each other; and our eyes seemed altogether salt and sea-weary with looking, for nearly five months, upon an unbroken circle of sea.

At last, upon the hundred and twenty-second day of imprisonment, the day broke clear and bright, and as they came from below – above the level of the Quarter Deck – each pair of eyes, used only to look round on an empty horizon, were greeted and stamped with the great bold moun-

tains of New Zealand, standing out of the sea, huge and clear, in the morning air.

If you have not yourselves met the experience, no poor words of mine will tell you what it is to set eyes suddenly on new land, after living for months on a plain of water; the eyes rest, actually rest on it, and it seems to stand out magnified, solid, and immovable, like a very piece of the great world that cannot be moved. We felt, as we looked, that we had at last and at length found again some peaks of the old earth, of the very existence of which, five months of days, and fourteen thousand miles of nothing but tossing salt water, had absolutely begun to make us sceptical.

Two days later we anchored in a hill-bounded harbour; the next we left the ship, slept upon the new and almost unpaced ground of the antipodes – and our experiences as colonists began.

That man must have a strong, cold heart, who in stepping from a ship's boat into a really new country, does not feel bewildered, and something desolate. When the first settlers put their foot into Canterbury, New Zealand, it was little better, or more cheering, than Juan Fernandez to Robinson Crusoe. The day we landed was rough and wild, with storms of hail and sleet driving up the harbour, making the collection of huts at the

back of the beach look miserable in the extreme. The plains the future scene of the settlers' operations, were separated from the landing-place, or port, by a ridge of mountains nearly two thousand feet high, over which there was no road, and merely a broken track to the other base. The impressions of our first day were by no means encouraging, and we slept our first night, 1 for want of better shelter, in a loft of loose, open boards, over a wooden shanty, where a mixture of sailors, and new arrivals, kept up a perpetual racket till near morning.

The first three days after arrival were spent in awaiting the landing of our baggage from the ship, in buying sawn timber for the building of a hut, and provisions of salt beef, flour and tea: and in chartering a small coasting craft to take the whole out of the harbour, and up an inland river, on the banks of which, somewhere, lay some land purchased upon paper in London. For this land we ourselves started on foot soon after daybreak the next day, and I never remember beginning to do anything that I thought more utterly and absurdly hopeless.

After crossing the steep ranges which I have named as forming a rugged barrier between the harbour and the open country, we struggled up, as the evening fell, through jungle and swamp to the banks of the river on which our land, as yet only known to us on paper, was supposed to lie. Almost at the same moment, to our great relief, the craft bearing our goods and chattels, which had had four and twenty hours start of us, and been two days on her trip, hauled round a bend of the river, and in an hour's time was moored to the bank close at hand.

We got out of her, as the sun sank, a small tent, some sugar, a saucepan and frying-pan, and some blankets and old bags; pitched our tent on the highest part of the bank – struck up a fire of small scrub – boiled or stewed some tea in the saucepan – cooked an unearthly mixture of flour and grease in the frying-pan – ate, drank – put out our camp fire for fear of its spreading among the fern and rushes on the river-bank – and finally retired into our blankets, and old bags, forgetting everything, even on which side of the world we were, and sleeping hard and sound, till the cold early air of the next morning awoke us to the Antipodes.

Sunrise, Number One.

THE feelings of a settler (especially if he has had but little daylight on the spot the evening before,) on the morning after his first camp in a new country, are mixed and peculiar. He feels very much as if he had been taken up from this earth, and dropped down promiscuously into another; he is altogether bewildered; he has no knowledge or acquaintance with the horizon about him; a big unknown hill plumps into his eyes on one side, a brand new river glitters into them on another, and the full level rays of the round morning sun finally dazzle into his eyes and finish him off altogether. He is, moreover, stiff, cold, and hungry: he hasn't combed his hair, is uncertain about washing arrangements, and idiotically indistinct as to the hitherto regular and distinct fact – the great institution of breakfast. In the first confusion of his ideas, he labours under a sort of momentary hallucination that the thing to do is to do what he has always done, all his life before, viz.: to ring the bell; this idea, however, rapidly vanishes as the stern reality of facts force themselves upon his mind – for where there is no house there can be no bell, and even if there were a bell, there is no servant, and even if there were

a servant, there is no kitchen, no fireplace, no pantry, no larder, no plates, no tea-cups, no bread-no butter, toast, or coffee, no breakfast-table – no nothing. -So that at last the whole difficulty, like the electric current in a wire circle, returns and re-concentrates itself upon the bewildered colonist who has first conceived it. Even so did it re-concentrate itself upon us – and this was its effect. We first washed our faces in an inconvenient and dripping kind of way in the river; for want of towels, drying them in an old bag, the effect of which is novel, certainly, but not soothing or agreeable. We then tore up enough of scrub with our hands wherewith to make a sort of imitation fire; the saucepan, or rather teapan, was again put into requisition, some tea stewed in it, some more un-namable mess fried in the frying-pan, and a meal perpetrated which was in its strictest sense a breakfast, for it was to us the breaking of our fast – and nothing more.

The day was spent in unloading the craft, and piling up round our tent, like fortifications, our boxes, packages, and casks, just as the traditional pictures represent old Crusoe after his shipwreck.

We were camped in one corner of an immense plain, forty to fifty miles in breadth, and nearly one hundred and thirty in length, forming what are now called the Canterbury Plains. They are

bounded inland by an almost continuous range of snowy mountains, stretching unbroken from one end of the island to the other; and sea-ward by the open waters of the South Pacific Where the sea and the land meet, the line is marked by a curve of shining foam stretching away for a hundred and thirty miles, unbroken, save at one point, where the hills of Bank's Peninsula, jutting into the sea, form the harbour we had so lately entered. It was as if a great line of beach swept up the English Channel from Dartmouth to Southampton, only one isolated block of hill or bay breaking the crescent of foam from end to end. With an on-shore wind, we could hear all day long the great hollow moaning of this hundred miles of sea, rolling in from the Pacific, and breaking day and night on this silent unpeopled coast. Very silent it was and unpeopled, if I except one tenant of the whole, – the only one before we came, – his resting place (not far from where we camped,) just beyond the reach of the waves, marked by a single rude grave, with a piece of ship-timber for a head-board, on which could just be traced initials something like H. L., roughly cut, and the date, 1822: the spot where the crew of some old whaler, years ago, had landed, and laid one of their number who could weather no more storms with them, but who had gone away where perhaps a weather-beaten old

South Sea Whaler would find a safe haven for always.

It was in the corner of this plain, and within hearing of these Pacific waves, that our first four Colonial years were spent. I shall not weary the reader with more details of this time than will serve to give a very unvarnished picture of the beginning of Colonial realities.

The beginning of life on a piece of the world on which men have not yet lived, is marked by one super-prominent feature – it is, that while you are in absolute want of everything, you have about you absolutely nothing: – no stock, no fences, no shelter, no house; and moreover and beyond this you have not even primitive simples, as mortar, a ladder, or slates; not even a grind-stone standing to sharpen your axe, nor in this case even a sapling to fell, to give it a handle. One all-important help which is present in most new countries, we lacked – a sufficient supply of rough standing timber. The plains for miles were destitute of a twig large enough to make a walking-stick, and almost all our supplies of timber, for fencing and building, had to be obtained by water, at great labour and cost, from a distant part of the coast.

The climate being at this point of the settlement very much the same as that in the less timbered parts of England – steadier, and less con-

stantly variable, but subject to driving storms of wind and rain – shelter became the first point aimed at. For days our goods and baggage stood in the open weather, only sheltered by bundles of fern cut on the river-banks; but at the end of the first fortnight, with the help of the sawn timber we had brought with us, a wooden hut was got up, under which ourselves and our more perishable properties found a cover. This done, our own, and the daily life of the settlers around us, became a continued struggle against nature, – nature so passive, yet so difficult to conquer. The practical observer, not taking so ambitious a view of it as this, would have summed it up in one word (which I shall ask to be allowed to use) – he would have called it "Botheration," – and so truly it was. Indeed I cannot promise to anyone, during the first years of his breaking-in to Colonial life, that pleasant picnic tone which may sometimes appear, in relation, to surround it.

The climate being so Anglican, the crops grown were just those raised in the old country, and it was necessary to begin by clearing the jungle of rough growth which covered the land: and for months this was the principal occupation. The breaking up of the unused, but rich soil below followed, and this latter had to be done in most cases with a team of cantankerous, half-broken bullocks, or

a pair of uncertain, restive horses: good stock of all kinds being scarce in the extreme, and a settler considered lucky who possessed anything in the shape of a draught animal that would do his work without jibbing, or kicking his shafts into splinters.

When, after time and trouble, we did at length succeed in getting our first crops into the ground, we had to keep a perpetual watch over them to prevent their devastation: for being close to the coast, we were harried and worried by herds of imported, half-wild, starving Australian cattle, which were landed from the harbor, and hungrily ravaged the country about us. They broke over our young defenceless crops – smashed the few poor fences we were enabled at first to erect – chose out the very centre of our choicest plots, and fought there desperate and bellowing tournaments with each other – and left us few nights of sleep, for a whole twelvemonth, that were not broken by the unmistakable hollow echo of their tramping, and a midnight expedition to scare them back by cracking of stock whips, and promiscuous firing of guns.

For some time in going to and fro to the town or village of Christchurch, which had gradually sprung up, we crossed, both going and coming, a deep river by a narrow shingle ford, the water

reaching to our chest, our clothes being rolled into a bundle on our heads, and a butter knapsack or pannier strapped to our shoulders; the butter (without being hurt) getting more or less wet, as the case might be. This butter-carrying work was a tramp of eight miles, and we did it for nearly two years in company with two clergymen of the Church of England, one of whom is now an Archdeacon, the other being a connection of the Peel family – a terrific walker, and commonly known in the country as the "Iron Parson."

One great possession and assistance that the settlers had, lay in the richness and fruitfulness of the soil. It was a deep rich chocolate loam, and, well broken up for a year, was easily worked, and gave back in return plentiful and fruitful crops. Still, whatever was done, had to be done under many branch and side difficulties which it is not easy to explain in full to an English experience. Whatever labour we employed was difficult to be got at in the first place, and very dear and very inefficient when obtained. In fact so unsatisfactory and troublesome was it, that by far the heaviest portion of the necessary work fell directly upon the shoulders of the early settlers themselves.

A man considered he did you a great favour by cutting your corn, and when you went to hire

a labourer, his most favourable reply was, that he would think it over and see what he could do for you. All that was done too was done without the existence of any positive market for what might be produced, and merely with the hope that one would eventually arise. Meanwhile we had to wait; to put up with short commons – generally of salt beef and flour – to cook our food (without too much firing) under a low chimney of sods built against a hole in the side of the hut, the top of which chimney we could touch with our hands, through which we could sit and watch the stars and moon at night, and down through which poured floods of water in time of rain.

We worked all day, and slept all night – ready, if the bellow of wild cattle aroused us, to be out at a moment's notice. Our hut, (and ours, remember, was but a picture of many others in the settlement,) was a perfect sieve of draughts; we could not even burn a candle in it, except by placing it in the lee of a milk-pan, erected over it; and in the storms of winter, which swept over the unsheltered plains behind us, the roar of the wind round the thin walls at night was wild and deafening. It was a curious period, and an experience that to every Colonist looks unreal when it is past; but I believe that I have in no way over-stated its difficulties, nor given an exaggerated idea of the realities that surround it.

Wild Ducks, & Mutual Socks.

AFTER we had led a solitary life on the riverside for nearly two years, a human being came and pitched his camp on the opposite bank. He was a gentleman, a good-natured fellow, not in the least fitted for a colonist, and spent his time (as far as I could make out) in alternately shooting wild-ducks, and swinging in a netting hammock slung in the verandah of his hut. His reign was short, yet I was sorry when he went.

He was succeeded by a heavy individual: a decent old fellow, hard-working and pig-headed. We induced his wife to wash our clothes: she did so – it being immediately afterwards obvious that the heavy old fellow wore our socks and his own promiscuously, and that he indulged to any extent in our pocket-handkerchiefs, a luxury which (be it observed) he had hitherto denied himself.

However, we were, in after times, able to render each other many mutual good services, which, to a very great extent, made up for the establishment of this peculiar commonalty of socks and pocket-handkerchiefs.

Shingler's Bread.

IN the neighbourhood of our earliest camp in the Island, and in fact for hundreds of miles in the less elevated districts, the weather was perfect, – bright, clear, and exhilarating for months, – and I doubt if it is surpassed as a healthy climate by any country in the world. All English trees, fruits, plants and flowers, grow and multiply; and strawberries and clotted cream of Devonshire are not lost by those who stand feet to feet with us in England. Devonshire cream reminds me of coffee, and this of the fact that, for a long time, we ground our wheat into flour in a coffee-mill, and baked and boiled it, bran and all, in a granulous and nobby state, into puddings and bread. It certainly formed a new variety in bread, but on the whole, I don't know that the decrease in quality was quite made up for by the increase of novelty.

Some few notes back, I have told how bare the plains were of timber. After enclosing and raising more immediately needful crops, great care was taken, in every direction, to rear and encourage

trees of all kinds. Tasmanian, Australian, and English trees were carefully planted, and their growth tended with all available means.

I have before me a photograph, lately received, which shows the once treeless spot of our first camp. It is now sheltered by ample belts of flourishing trees – poplar, blue-gum, pine, willow, and laburnum: – in the photograph an old friend of mine is standing under a blue-gum seventy feet high. The house, whose gable ends look out in a homely and hospitable way through the trees, was the second which rose upon the ground. The labour of building was made lighter by one or two incidents which are perhaps sufficiently smilable to record.

We had got up, without help, the inside and outside walls, the partitions, roof, and framework; but not having been initiated into the art of putting on shingles for a roof, after some negociation, we secured a professional shingler from the port town. An arrangement was made by which the shingler was to provide himself with everything except bread. We already occupied the half-finished house; and, his cuisine and ours being separate establishments, we provided him with a separate larder. Our larder was a hole in the wall, left as a future chimney; and with great liberality and forethought, we provided the shingler, as his own private and particular larder, with a

winnowing machine, in the mysterious hollows of which he securely bestowed his bread and cheese upon the shelf. But, as I have said, we were responsible for the bread department.

Now our bread had always one marked and distinguishing feature – it was very substantial; and concluding that the shingler had a more powerful appetite than ourselves, we made his bread especially substantial. The shingler came, and shingled away at the roof for days; still, he never came for fresh bread; and we began to think that he must have a wonderfully delicate appetite, or that he had perhaps some peculiar constitutional distaste for bread: till, one day, it being necessary for us to move the winnowing machine, one of its little trap-doors fell open, and discovered a perfectly new baker's loaf, with a pound of butter in a hollow cut in the crumb. At the same moment, the shingler entered and explained the whole matter by addressing us as follows: "Yes, I've been four miles into Port to get a baker's loaf. You'm all very well yourselves, but your bread's as undigestible as a cow's horn." – In fact we had made his bread so awfully substantial that the poor shingler could not face it: so four loaves, chopped up with an axe, went to the fowls, and the fifth we built into the wall of the house, and very good wall it made, and – as far as I know, – there it is now.

The New Chum – His Bed.

BEFORE the house was finished, an English friend arrived and found us out. He was (if the reader will be kind enough not to mention it again) rather a swell. He arrived in a hat, and, what we had then never seen before, a "Noah's Ark" Coat; and really, with our primitive belongings, he rather alarmed us, and, – truth to tell, – I fancy our primitive belongings rather alarmed him. However, the day closed and we had to give him quarters for the night; so having nothing better, we put him to bed on a door we had just made, supported at the ends by two empty casks. He rather delicately introduced himself into this peculiar sleeping apparatus, and cautiously composed himself to slumber. We too retired, dropped into sleep, and all was quiet. Suddenly, at midnight, a perfectly unearthly uproar broke the stillness of the night. We jumped up instantly and felt about in the darkness for our long-coated friend, whom we had put to bed on the door, discovering at last that one of the casks had rolled forward under his ricketty couch, and

launched him, with great swiftness and precision, into the middle of a heap of barley, on the top of which a litter of puppies and their mother had comfortably camped for the night. We picked him up from among the chaos of barley, darkness, and dogs, but nothing would induce him again to allow himself to be put to bed upon the door; and though we at once made him up quite an excellent bed upon the barley, I do not think he ever forgot his first night's quarters at the Antipodes.

First Church.

THERE are two marked eras in the life of every new settler – the one that comes to him last, I propose to say a few words about first. It is a telling and very pointed sign of the times when he first finds that his week is marked and hedged in at both ends by the coming of a true Sunday. However little the new-world settler may have in him of the saint, or however much, though living under new skies, he may wish to think the day still hallowed, yet there is a commonness all unworthy of it, and a

flatness of tone (which those who have never missed these home tokens cannot measure) in the passing of a day, – though it be the seventh, – which is not welcomed by bells whose chime he knows, and parted from with the echo of organ notes as farewell.

A seventh day and a day of rest may come, but, except the old signs mark it, the day which his fathers kept before him is not there; and it is a time that touches him very nearly, and tells him of old times, and seems to bring him a thousand miles nearer home, when the day is restored to him, endeared with something of the old remembered surroundings.

So, after the first year or two are beginning to pass (devoted as they must be to insuring bread and food from the untouched earth, and raising shield and shelter overhead) it is an era to hear a bell, however small, from a spire, however low, ring out to tell him that, till another sunrise, he may rest from his labours.

The first church within reach of our camp on the River Heathcote opened its low door about two years after the settlers first pitched their tents upon its banks. It was small and low, yet it had a homely look, for its walls were raised of cob, like more than one other in my native county; and though wild tussocks and great flax-blades still grew up close to its walls, yet it was a church; and being a church, a sign of home to us, and a gain – a gain

a hundredfold valued, because it had been lost – and found.

The services at first were simple: the reader perhaps would have called them rude – but we were content. The clergyman often came up wet and tired (for he rode from a distance), and the settlers could not always keep the strictest time, for many of them came from far. At first, too, there was no bell to ring them to the door; and the seats were only rude seats, and the singing was not perfect singing; but I do not think their poor service the less won for them the many things they stood in need of – for, they had done what they could.

So we got our church; and it was astonishing to mark the social bettering and improvement which from that time spread around the district. The settlers, meeting regularly at the church door, became more sociable to each other: the work during the week seemed lighter, and the rest at the week's end quieter; and Saturday night became more like Saturday night, because Sunday morning was more like Sunday morning. It is an era in new-world life, when Sunday likens to the Sunday of the fatherland.

The Bishop – His Robes.

HAVING, as I have said, succeeded in getting our Church, – about this time it became necessary to have Churchwardens; and a gentleman, the son of a clergyman in the North of Devon, was appointed warden for the Parish, having the writer as his very inefficient colleague. The duties of a Churchwarden, at all events at first, in the service of New Zealand Churches, differed from, or rather were more numerous than those of his original type in England. Besides his vestry and parish duties, he had to look after the repairs of the Parsonage; to open the Church door on Sundays; to arrange the Communion Table; make the collections; see that there was water in the font; arrange for and provide against noisy boys, and possible dogs; soothe the choir, which very often wouldn't be soothed; and, what was more responsible than all, – on not infrequent occasions, – to receive and dress the Bishop of the Diocese.

Now there is no man in the Colony, I believe, for whom there is felt a more universal, and well-earned respect and esteem, than for Dr. Harper, the Bishop of Christchurch.

He was, and is, earnest, zealous, conciliatory – a pattern Colonial Bishop – but still, whether right or wrong, it is impossible to deny that his reception and the arrangement of his robes, were to us very formidable operations. His Lordship rode over to our Church on horseback, going on from thence still further to another Church in the afternoon. We received him at the churchyard gate, unsaddled and tethered out his horse, bringing into the vestry his robes, which he carried strapped upon his saddle, in a valise. On emerging from this close imprisonment, however, they presented a very sorry picture, for a perfect mass of seams ran up and down the black satin, and the lawn sleeves were hopelessly crushed, and wrinkled. In despair I often wished I was a smoothing iron to restore them to themselves. My brother Churchwarden too, I know, shared with me in this anxiety.

The little Church to which his Lordship came was built within a mile of us, and though all in it was not quite as it may be by and by, yet those who came to it then, lacked too many things to criticise too closely what they gained; and the Bishop wore his robes with all dignity, and a good man will beckon his people after him, even though his raiment be somewhat ruffled in his duty: so the settlers heard him gladly, and said of him what, for a moment, may sound hardly well to say; still it is true, and has a meaning beyond the words.

This is what they said of the Bishop, when at sunset he had bid them good bye; they said: "There is no mistake about Bishop Harper."

Is there any Bishop anywhere who would be offended, or think himself disparaged, if this, heartily, were said of him?

Washerwoman – also Pat.

I HAVE named two eras as marking the advance of new lands. The second is one which I must not forget to give you.

There is an institution in England, whose deep and great value, and whose evermore influence upon our welfare we scarcely recognise as it deserves – an institution which, almost unseen, carries out its weekly mission – an institution upon whose proper working the happiness of thousands depends: – the great institution of Washerwoman.

Now, in a new world, among the many things that are not, the Washerwoman is one; and as in England every one, – as we read, – may, if he likes, be his own lawyer, every man his own doctor, – so, at the Antipodes, at first, every man must be his

1 I may perhaps say that "we" were in this case represented by the writer's brother and himself, at that time in the possession of the grand totals of eighteen years and seventeen respectively.

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own Washerwoman. However little he may know about soda, or clothes-lines, or crimping, or Italian irons, or blue, he must himself plunge, mentally and practically, into a sea of uncertainty and soapsuds; and in many cases which I have seen, he has done this so utterly wrongly, and so hopelessly badly, that to look at him is really perfectly weepable. "The things," – instead of coming in folded-smoothed, and aired, – being first scrubbed and worried in half cold and entirely hard water, screwed up and wrung out with a most unmitigated wrench, and then stuck about upon thorns and bushes, wrinkled up and withered, looking like ghosts of departed garments, suffering under eternal rheumatism.

It is therefore an era, when time having brought civilisation, civilisation (bearing as her arms and shield a wash-tub festooned with clothes'-lines) brings the great institution I have named. It is in short, an era indeed, when the settler ceases to be his own Washerwoman.

This era came to us twice; once during our third year on the river where we first pitched our Robinson Crusoe camp; and once during our sojourn on the forks of the Harketere; but for years after both these eras, it never came at all, and we continued weekly to dabble our nearer garments in a running stream, and to spread them, to bleach like sheepskins, on the railings of our stock-yard.

About the first Washerwoman period, servants began to crop up and come into existence to some extent. They were an immense advantage and assistance; but occasional specimens were eccentric in the extreme.

Among many others, I remember one whom it is impossible to forget – an Irishwoman, good-hearted and willing, but knowing little more of civilised necessities than a Maori woman. Her husband worked on the farm: he wore the regulation battered black hat, and the real traditional patched and ragged coat, really and strictly with only one tail. Moreover, he smoked a short dodeen pipe, and kept a thoroughbred private shillelah in his clothes-box.

He was respectful, however, and good-natured in the extreme. One day we sent him to town – three miles – to get a pair of horses shod, and to bring back a couple of bottles of yeast. During the whole of his journey back, the mare he was leading would not lead; but dragged back, with her head in the air every minute: the horse he was riding boring steadily forward, regardless of Pat, the mare, and the bottles. He hadn't the ghost of a pocket about him into which to put the bottles, but held on, with the reins and a bottle in one hand, and the leading-halter and another bottle in the other. Every now and then the led mare would come to a dead stop, and Pat, carried back on his horse, would be nearly pulled apart by the dead drag upon his arms.

The yeast, too, excited by the jolting, kept popping out the corks and oozing out all over him. It was a very hot day, and he got back in the last stage of botheration. Instead of being impudent and sulky, as many colonial servants would have been, and telling us we might get the next yeast ourselves, he respectfully placed the bottles on the ground, and wiping his head with his one coat-tail, merely said, "Arrah, yer honor, but I've had a power o' pother with them pottles."

His wife had two disadvantageous peculiarities. She nearly killed us with the unspeakable messes she prepared to represent food, and (for reasons which she never clearly explained) she would wear her night-cap all day long.

The long and short of the thing was, that we had to give them both notice to leave the very day they came into the house, and they took it as good naturedly as if we had given them five shillings and a new hat.

Curfew without a Bell.

JULY (MID-WINTER), 1853.

AFTER some weeks of incessant storm and almost continuous floods of rain, we sat one night in our hut, one on each side of a wavering and rather feeble fire. Through the hut the wind hurried with a perpetual whistle which at times became almost a scream; while over the thin roof, close to our heads, the gale roared and raged as if it would sweep our intruding shanty from the plains. Our chimney, or rather smoke-hole, (for it was only ten feet high) was built of heavy earthen sods, and being broad and thick, was some two or three tons in weight. It had been drenched through and through during a wet, black winter, the Sou'-West storms beating full upon it. As we sat, greatly weary, after a hard and drenching day, and tired out with the incessant howling of the wind, the back of the fire-place suddenly bulged in against us, and the whole mass of the chimney itself fell, the next second, with a thundering boom, upon our flickering fire, and rolled in great earthy blocks out upon our hut-floor and ourselves. – The instant it

was down, the wind tore into the hut through the open space with a sudden roar, – revengeful that it had been kept out so long; the rain lashed in with it almost horizontally, and as we had had no candle lighted, the burying of our lire left us in outer darkness; the first thing that became at length visible through the gap, being great grey volumes of clouds flying over the tops of the hills behind us, torn to pieces by the wind as they came.

Our curfew had been administered with a vengeance, and without a bell.

Hoarfrost Coverlet.

AT length, – when the spot upon which we had first pitched our camp upon the coast had been reduced from an utter wilderness to comparatively habitable order, – we started upon an expedition to get back into the interior, with a view of discovering, if possible, available sheep-country.

The expedition consisted of one old Colonial hand and myself, tolerably well mounted, and having with

us provisions which, at a pinch, could be made to spread over a fortnight or three weeks. We struck away from the coast down the plains of the island, steering almost due south for two days: at the end of that time, we left all traces of civilisation behind us, and crossed a large, rapid river, which had hitherto almost entirely bounded the operations of the settlers.

This river, the Rakaia, was then – and has been nearly up to the present time – a great obstacle to the advance of the colonists into the interior: it cuts for itself, for nearly fifty miles, a straight course across the plains, from the base of the mountains to the sea, occupying, in some places, a bed a mile and a half in width, Fed from the glaciers of the Southern Alps, it pours down its bed a rapid and heavy body of water at all times, and is with difficulty fordable on horseback; but at uncertain times in the spring and summer, when the deep snow on the lower ranges is melted by heavy rains, it is flooded with great billows of rolling grey water, and becomes impassable, even by an elephant. The working of a boat is made exceedingly difficult and dangerous from the fact that its bed of loose shingle and boulder-stones is constantly shifting, and bars of sand and stone are thrown up weekly in new directions, cutting the channel up into a dozen different streams, more or less separated by banks of loose boulders.

After crossing this river – not without risk of our lives, whatever they were worth – we took, as it were, the first turning to the right, and struck up towards the base of the mountains, inland, reaching on the fourth night a district which seemed likely to promise well for the object of our expedition. After fording our horses through another rapid river, the Harketere – not so large as the first, but similar to it – we rode up late in the evening into a wild tract of country altogether beyond the farthest back station, and as far as we could judge, from a rough knowledge of an unsurveyed country, uncovered by the claims of any previous explorer.

The sun had some time set, and the daylight was fast leaving us, as we rode up from the riverbed: so we pulled up our dripping horses at the very first spot which would give us a decent camping ground for the night, and prepared for a halt till the sun thought proper to come back from behind the mountain-tops again.

We had halted upon the exact spot shown on the cover of this book, and I make a note of this night, because – though we did not know it then – we were camped for the first time on a tract of country, of about thirty thousand acres, which we afterwards held for nearly eight years. We were within twelve miles of the base of an Alpine range of mountains, snow-topped: the plains about us had that tangled, ragged look which utterly unoccupied country

has, and the climate, from elevation, was more severe than that which we had hitherto experienced, being, in fact, a second step in the gradations of the climate of the country.

It was a clear moonlight night, with a sharp, ringing white-frost setting in. We tethered our horses to large, deep-rooted tussocks of coarse grass, unstrapped each a pair of red blankets from our packs, and, rolled therein, – with our saddles for pillows, – lay down on the ground to sleep away the night.

There was nothing whatever in the shape of wood, within reach of our camp, which would enable us to make more than a few minutes' flash of fire, to boil a tin pot of tea; so that any idea of the traditional camp-fire was altogether out of the question.

I do not think any one knows what it is to be thoroughly and really cold to the bones, till he has slept out for a moonlight night on the ground, with one red blanket over him, and a sharp, keen frost gradually changing the red of the blanket to a crisp, glittering white. The old colonial hand who was with me shivered audibly, and notwithstanding the many nights of cold camping which followed, I still distinguish this one as pre-eminently below zero. Though we were dead tired, we could sleep but little; we lay awake and listened to the swamp-hens near us, calling monotonously hour after hour, – we could see the mountains, close above,

glimmering with their white tops through the night, – we could hear the chilly rattle of the river we had crossed, as it rolled all night among the boulder-stones, – and we watched the cold, white moon, as the hours went, sinking slowly to the horizon. After a long time she sank very silently down to the edge of the plains, lingered for a moment, as if to take a last look at our camp, and then dropped altogether out of sight, leaving the night quite dark, and bitter cold. I need not tell you how we longed for morning, – how we tried to think we were warm, – how we dozed and dreamt we were in the water on a winter's day, – and how slowly the morning came; and as grey streaks at last drew lines through- the darkness, how stiff and white everything began to show itself; the grass-blades (green and smooth last night), stiff and rough with rime, – a pool of water near us fastened over with starred ice, – the rough coats of our horses' backs white with hoarfrost, – and we ourselves like two white mounds upon a frosty, winter field. We did not need calling; before the earliest ground-lark on the plains gave a solitary morning chirp, we had thrown off our stiffened blankets, and were knocking the rime off what little sticks and twigs we could find to coax a fire into existence. The night, meanwhile, gradually paled away into grey morning, and at last above the plain the red edge of the sun rose slowly up, and day came back to us again, and we shivered

as each new sensation of warmth ran through our bodies benumbed with cold; – in fact, for the first hour, we spoke very much as if we were walking organs on two legs, and somebody had pulled out the tremolo stop.

So passed my first night of eight years, in the forks of the Harketere.

After a pocket-knife meal of bread and mutton, which we had carried rolled up in our blankets, we saddled and mounted, and rode for three hours up through the forks of the river, examining closely the geography of the country, the character of the growth of grass, and the supply of timber, water, and shelter. By this time the sun was well up, and the frost having melted from the stiffened blades, we stopped on some good grass-country, and gave our horses two hours' feeding time: after this, we struck in zig-zag lines – for better examination of the country – up towards the mountains, the country being all level, but rough and tangled, with a strong growth of coarse tussocks, pampas-grass, snow-grass (similar to the pampas, but having a deep red tinge in the blade) and Spaniard or spear-grass, the latter growing in strong plants from one to four feet high, and being a perfect chevaux-de-frise of bristling green thorns, like porcupine quills. Notwithstanding the care with which our horses avoided them, their legs were bleeding freely all day, stuck in every direc-

tion; and our own – for we frequently had to push through the worst places on foot – were so thickly stabbed that they ached for weeks afterwards.

By sundown, after a hard day, we reached the base of the mountains, and found the fork of the river crossed by a large dark forest of black birch, extending for thirty thousand acres, on the plain and up the hill-side, nearly to the snow level. Here we had for the night a most luxurious camp; we halted in a semi-circular bay of the forest, the dark line of the tree trunks edging the plain as regularly and symmetrically as in a park. We chose our lair for the night under a thickly branched birch tree, in the shadow of which it was already half night, – we collected a pile of dead fern for mattresses and coverlet, – lit a huge fire within safe distance of our camp, – sat down before it on a fallen tree, – boiled our tin pannikins of tea, – again attacked the bread and mutton with the miraculous appetite which exploring gives, – heaped more dead logs upon the fire, – finally, wedged ourselves in among our fern bedding, – and slept a sound, hard sleep, without dreams, till broad daylight, with the sun full up, awoke us to another morning.

It had been a keen frost again, though we had not felt it; but our horses, tethered to tufts of snow-grass, had had another hard night of it, and stood motionless, dreamily warming themselves into life in the rays of the morning sun. The forage on the

spot was poor, and for their sakes we started, almost as soon as we had risen from our camp, halting at the first good grass for three hours' feeding.

This day, and the two or three following, we spent in farther examination of the country, and in satisfying ourselves of its extent, and capabilities for carrying stock and sheep; starting back at length for the coast, as rapidly as possible, in order to secure it by a formal application to the Land Commissioners.

With our return journey I shall not detain the reader: the first six hours were made through a dense fog which shut out all land-marks, and compelled us to steer by pocket-compass. We successfully re-crossed the large river I have named, and passed into the settled districts as quietly as possible, to avoid giving any clue to the direction whence we had come; lest some one who had not been at the risk and trouble of getting upon the country, should step in before us with a paper claim, and spoil our intended application.

On the morning following our return, we presented ourselves at the Office of the Crown Commissioner, and handed in an application, a copy of which I give here, as it shows the mode in which newly discovered country was then secured. It was worded as follows: –

"We, the undersigned, hereby apply for forty thousand acres of country in the Province of Canterbury; bounded on the north, by the northernmost branch of the River Harketere – on the south, by a second branch of the same river – westward, by a black-birch forest and the base of the snowy ranges – and eastward, to the extent required."

A License to occupy – conditional upon the necessary country eventually proving to exist on survey – was granted us, but it was not till two years later that we were securely placed in possession.

On the boundaries and neighbourhood of our application becoming known, we were warned, on all sides, that the country was useless, that the climate was dangerously severe, and that, if we ever took stock into it, we should never get them out; but notwithstanding these ominous warnings, we stocked it with success, and held it for some years. It proved to be a most valuable run, and amply rewarded us for the time and exertion we had used in gaining and holding it.

On the Road.

A FORTNIGHT later, a larger expedition, consisting of three hands and myself, left the coast to take delivery of a flock of a thousand sheep, not far from the Nelson, or northernmost boundary of the Province. Passing up the island through wild and hardly occupied country – alternately level and broken with rolling downs, and cut into, at intervals, by the usual treacherous and unbridged river – on the third evening we reached the station for which we were bound, and found, of course, – as is almost invariably the case in the colonies, – nothing whatever ready or arranged for the delivery of the sheep. One delay and another kept us for eight days, our party sleeping in a row at night on the floor of the common room, on sheep-skins. When at last we started, we had about three weeks' drive before us, it not being possible to take sheep through new country at a greater average rate than ten miles a day, without knocking up and losing a large number.

A word or two here about sheep in the colonial meaning of the word. Colonial sheep are not English sheep. They are – though tolerably well-bred – half-wild, unmanageable animals, accustomed to roam over great tracts of open country, allowing no one to approach them within half a mile, but

stretching away at full gallop, and trying the mettle of good dogs to head them. Having been yarded during the necessary drafting and branding for three days and nights without food, our flock, – by this time half-starved and twice wild, – -strung away at starting, at a rapid pace, seeking ravenously for feed.

It was about three o'clock on a dark-looking afternoon when we got away on our journey, and by twilight we had crossed a stretch of level country, and reached the mouth of a deep valley which led up into a pass over ranges immediately in front of us: and here, though we had but little shelter or advantage for camping, we were compelled to stop, as the daylight was fast leaving us.

Before actually camping, I will, with permission, give the reader a short idea of the order of travelling with sheep in the interior. As a rule, to drive a mob of sheep for any distance, takes not less than four hands, – with three horses saddled, and one packed with provisions and baggage, – but it must be remembered that, in a young country, everything being difficult to obtain, the appointments of first explorers are often necessarily poor and rude: and the difficulties of the route, over a broken and unknown district, imperatively oblige the reduction of their baggage to the smallest possible weight and compass; so that when one says "baggage and provisions," these are to be taken in a limited and

qualified sense. A pair of blankets, and a tin quart-pot per man; a frying-pan, tether ropes, butcher's knife, a bag of flour, and canvas bags of sugar and tea; a nob of salt, and a few boxes of matches – with a reserve of flint and tinder for a pinch – in most cases make up the list; and in the drive I am describing we had little more. During the day, the sheep have to be got somehow over the steep sides of hills, and through long stretches of plains, as well as the tangled growth of a wild country, the rugged nature of the ground, and the greater or less heat of the day will allow. It needs incessant care to prevent stragglers breaking away from the head and sides of the mob, and the rear of the flock, made up of the weaker sheep, requires an equally constant look-out. The horses are led or ridden, as the ground allows; and in country which the explorers know, the best camping-spots are steered for, and the night-halts, if possible, made there; but in driving through unknown country, the halts are made very much where the explorers find themselves at sundown.

For nearly a week before our first night's camping, heavy rain had been falling, and it was drizzling thickly when we prepared to camp. The sheep were so wild and restless that it was necessary to keep a double watch: two of us took charge at seven o'clock, the other two camping; – it being arranged that each pair should call the other after

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ON THE ROAD.

four hours' watch. This watching consists of continual walking, backwards and forwards, round the flock, from one point to another, to check the constant efforts of the sheep to break away. As soon as the watcher has stumbled over the rough ground to one end of the flock, an unquiet and suspicious bleat or two, and a rattle of tramping feet will summon him to the other, where a throng of grey nodding heads will be indistinctly seen, stringing out from the main circle, and trying to break away through the darkness. This attempt having been frustrated, a similar one calls him – like a human pendulum – to the other end, and then back again, and back again, and so on through the night; till the time at last comes for calling out the other human pendulum, who meanwhile has been enjoying his night's rest somewhat in the following way. – He has cut (if he could get them) five sticks, upon which to form a framework; over these (if he has one to spare) he has thrown a red blanket, lashing it at the corners to pegs, or placing heavy stones along the edge; at one gable end of this mansion he has hung up his oil-skin coat as a break-wind to his head, – again applying the great stone-principle to keep it down, – and bracing the whole against the wind by flax-lines, lashed to the ground fore and aft. In fact he has produced a structure not a whit less rude than that shown in the sketch attached, which very faithfully

recalls one of our evening camps "on the road" of this very journey.

On the ground under this lordly roof, – when he can raise it, – the sheep-watching colonist has laid his saddle-cloth and pea-jacket, and on these his remaining pair of blankets, – having placed at his head, for a pillow, his saddle, supported on each side by his boots: these last, be it observed, being the only articles of clothing of which at his evening toilet the explorer divests himself. Having arranged his lair as described, he crawls, like a weary caterpillar, into it, draws his spare red blanket over him, and though (as was the case with us on our first night's camp) the ground below him be soft and black with rain, he sleeps heavily, from sheer weariness; till – perhaps dreaming that years have passed, and that he is again in his old home in old England – he is aroused by his more weary fellow-watcher and fellow-pendulum, to come out into the night, and pendulate through his share of the wet, dark watch round the flock.

On the particular night I am alluding to, we had great trouble with the sheep; wild and half-starving, they tried to break away at every point, and were restless and unmanageable. Meanwhile the rain fell heavily; thick clouds made the night black and dark; the ground round the camp, trampled by the sheeps' feet and our own, was churned into mud; and the rain found its way into our shoulders and boots,

and dripped through our blanket-tents. At two o'clock it poured in torrents, and continued to fall heavily till daylight. The moment we could see the light – something like dirty gruel – coming through the clouds, we broke up our camp without attempting fire or breakfast of any kind, saddled our horses, and let the sheep pour away, in long lines, up the sides of the pass we had to traverse. As they were in a state of almost chronic starvation, we allowed them to spread out, in loose order, over a space of something like a hundred acres. Deep cross-gullies, and spurs of the range kept on jutting out and checking our advance; and every now and then creeks, – or running streams with swampy hollow banks undermined by the current, – would oblige us to head the flock, and choosing the most available place, (sheep having almost as much dread of water as a human being of fire) to force the leaders of the mob across and keep the main body crossing at the same points, having invariably to drag many, streaming and half-drowned, from under the overhanging banks, where otherwise they would feebly paddle till time and water drowned them. This operation, assisted by the rain which fell all the morning, left us in the evening very wet, and in poor plight for watching, and sleeping on the soaked ground; and though the night was dry, we passed a very cold and sorry camp, and started the next morning still wet and stiff.

No Bridge.

AFTER the last note, I find in my diary that two days later – the first fortunately fine, enabling us to dry our blankets by hanging them over our saddles, and the second wet again – we found ourselves clear of the ranges, on level country, and about six in the evening slowly rounding down into the broad shingle bed of a river, – now called the Ashley, – which was running down in three heavy streams, yellow and swollen with the rains. We pushed our sheep hard against the edge of the bank, and surrounded them on the land side by pitching two blanket-tents, and tethering two sheepdogs to big stones, at points about thirty or forty feet apart, lighting a camp-fire at another point – thus forming a kind of cordon round them, so that one hand was sufficient to keep the watch, while the other three slept. Having done this, and collected enough of drift-wood in the river-bed to keep the fire up during the night, we killed a sheep which had broken its leg in a crush, in the course of the day, and broiled great slabs of his body in the fire, carving at them with our pocket-knives, with a

degree of hunger which in new-world expeditions – what with uncertainty and exposure – generally keeps well up to the starvation level.

It cannot be too distinctly remembered that in a new country there is, speaking roundly, absolutely nothing. No matter what difficulties you get into, there have been there no hard-working ancestors who, for a thousand years before, have been providing you with the means to get out of them. If you make the shore in a coasting craft, no one has thrown out a breakwater, or put up a pier to enable you to land; if you are wandering on a wide plain, no one has put up a finger-post to direct you; if you toil across a barren plain up to the base of a range of hills, and are full weary on reaching them, no nameless but excellent ancient Briton (or modern one either) has laboriously cut zig-zag lines of road for you to mount the ranges, or bored tunnels for you to pass through them. On a dark evening in winter, with big flakes of snow beginning to fall through the grey air, there is no "hotel de voyageur" in the bottom of a wild ravine; if a long summer's sun has parched up your throat, you must find for yourself the green spot where water wells up, or burn with thirst till you do; if you are hungry, you must feed yourself as best you may; – and over a broad swollen river, no old-world unknown benefactor has built a strong stone bridge, that you may go over safe and dry-shod.

There you are alone – you and nature; and you must make the best terms with her you can.

We were not the only explorers who had waked, after a long night, to find a flooded, bridgeless river before us, knowing, as we did full well, that we had left another in our rear, and that they shut us in, till it was their own good pleasure to release us.

I never remember recognising so distinctly as on that morning (of our Ashley camp) the full advantages of Huns and Celts, and Picts and Scots, and Ancient Britons, and old-world fellows generally. It became at once clear that their mission (even though they ground themselves away in the operation) was to rub down the rough edges of the world, in order that we, whose time has fallen in later days, might walk through the earth safely, and at our own sweet will. It is one thing to fly over a deep but civilised stream in an express train, to hear a little extra rattle, to look out of the window and say "Oh! – Bridge," and before you have settled yourself into your corner again, to be half-a-mile on the other side; but it is quite another to come up, on a streaming evening, to a wild, uncurbed river, and look hopelessly across two hundred yards of thick, rapid water, and wonder how on earth you are to get yourself, your horses, your baggage, and a thousand sheep to the other side. It will not do for me to keep the reader on the banks of this river as long as we were kept there,

as even if he had time to send out and provision himself, he might begin to think the thing a bore. We were kept there four days; shepherding our sheep on the adjoining plains, cooking food, collecting fire-wood, and taking in turns heavy pulls of sleep, by day; and watching, as before, by night.

On the fourth morning we succeeded, at some risk, in fording the river, the water just boiling over the saddle-bows, and making our horses rock to and fro as the weight of rapid water surged against them.

With very few exceptions, all the New Zealand South Island rivers are similar in conformation to this one, and crossing them is often attended with considerable risk, because their beds are so constantly shifting, and because the so-called fords by which they are crossed almost invariably converge immediately below into rapids, in which it is scarcely possible for a horse or man to swim, and into which, if a horse is washed off his legs in fording, he is almost of necessity rolled before he can regain either bank. The current, too, is too powerful to allow a horse to push straight across from bank to bank; he is compelled to give way before the stream (running from six to ten miles an hour) and to cross in a diagonal line.

It is usual, therefore, to enter at the extreme upper end of any supposed ford, in order to allow as much space as possible below, for the necessary

giving way of the horse down the stream; and as the actual force of the current is not known till tested by getting well out into the body of the stream, it takes a cool head and a nice judge of the depth and strength of the remaining water, to calculate, – with the thick turbid flood foaming over the saddle-bow, and the horse already rocking unsteadily under him, – whether or no it is possible to press over the current still before him, without being forced down into the rapid below. Of course if he decide to turn back, it is even then quite probable that he may be too far in to clear the head of the rapid, and regain even the bank he has left: in which case he has before him only a choice of equal evils, and a good chance of serious accident.

I very much regret to say that good men have been lost in these rivers, and I myself can count six men whom I knew well (and two of whom held adjoining stations to our own) who were lost in crossing them, during the time we were working together in the interior.

I have been a little long in describing the fording of these rivers, because in up-country work their passage is incessantly necessary, and because I shall allude to them once or twice again.

After fording the Ashley in the manner I have described, we succeeded in finding, lower down the river, a point at which it was possible to attempt crossing the sheep. Deep water is invariably chosen

for crossing sheep over large rivers, as the fords are too rapid to allow of their swimming: they are forced into the deep current at a point where it sets to the opposite bank, and left to their own devices to get out, They give immense trouble, for though a few score may be thrust by main force into the water, they obstinately turn round again and again, and re-swim to the bank they have left, exhausting themselves, by hours of resistance, before the struggle really comes in crossing the main stream itself. More than that, they make desperate efforts to break away from the river-bed altogether, and are only held together by frantic efforts of shouting men, and perpetual galloping of sheepdogs. When at last the head of the mob are induced to strike out over the waste of water they see before them, and the main body follow, they rarely gain the other bank till the current has carried them perhaps a furlong down the river, and some of their number are swept into rough water below, and washed helplessly down till their white heads sink out of sight below the whirl.

Two days are constantly taken in crossing large mobs; and in one case a friend of mine was three days trying to cross only three hundred sheep over a rapid river, (the Rangitata) and was then compelled to give it up in despair; and he and his shepherd carried them over bodily in pairs, on horseback, – fording the river time after time, till their horses were cramped and

stiff with cold. He told me that his exasperation passed all possible human calculation. Three days' delay and wet hard work, and three extra nights' camping and watching, without succeeding in forcing these three hundred obstreperous wild animals to take the water, nearly reduced him to a state of raving idiotcy, and he assured me it took him weeks to recover his normal senses: – and from experience I can fully understand and sympathise with the desperation of his feelings.

A quarter of an hour after beginning the attempt to cross our sheep over the Ashley, we were wet to the waist; and wet we continued all day, till sundown found us, horses, flock, and all, (with a loss only of a few of the weaker sheep) across at last on the other bank. Here we got a fine night, and camped and watched again as on the other side; but in the morning, when we let the sheep break away, they left more than one of their number dead and stiff on the ground, from yesterday's crushing, and from camping, streaming wet and starving, on the shingle.

The drive, after this, continued with varying fortune for three weeks. We crossed, – with much difficulty but unusually little loss, – two other main rivers, on one of which we were checked for eight days by an impassable flood, and both of which were dangerous and treacherous enough in all conscience. We drove steadily by day, steering down

the plains due South, and camping at night as best we could; and, – except in the river-beds, where we chanced on a little drift-wood, – getting scarcely a stick of fire-wood on the route.

At last, after much wet weather, and twenty-five nights of watching, and camping on the ground, – about noon on a welcome fine day, our sheep, horses, and selves slowly trailed up out of the very riverbed close to which the old colonial hand and myself had, eight weeks before, camped through the night I have before described as being so pre-eminently below zero.

Here we got at length a night's unbroken sleep; for being on our own country we could let the sheep go for the night. We pitched our rather dilapidated blankets in the shelter of a small "scrub" or copse, and slept on the ground a long night's deep sleep, – for we were all by this time a good deal tired out.

We spent the next week at this camp, keeping an eye on the sheep at twilight and daybreak, and allowing our horses and selves a spell of rest and recovery. From this point we shifted to a scrub about four miles off, and built ourselves a hut of wattle and clay, roofing it with pampas-grass, cut at the roots with a cooper's adze.

Goodbye to the Old Hut.

IN this wattle hut we continued during the summer and autumn, intending to make it our winter quarters. We spent what spare time we had, at the forest I have named as crossing the head of the run, – about ten miles distant, – employed in felling trees, and splitting rough timber for a more permanent house, wool-shed and yards. Two of us used to pack a horse with flour and meat, and – leaving the others at the hut with the sheep – go up to the forest, remaining there till we were compelled to return to the hut for provisions. At this forest, or "bush," as it is invariably called in the colonies, we got the only change of diet which nature (here very stingy in her larder supplies) yielded us. In the bush were numbers of wood-pigeon, large and in good condition, and sufficiently curious about our operations, and innocent of our intentions, to sit on the branches above our heads and wink at us, first with one eye and then with the other, until we took up a gun, which we always kept by us while at work, and brought one or two of them down. We carefully abstained, however, from shooting a bird more than we actually required for our larder.

Our cooking utensils were divided between the party at the bush, and the party at the hut.

The hut-party had a frying-pan and an iron baking-pot, while the bush-party (of which I was one) were set up in house-keeping with a saucepan: and in the saucepan we boiled and stewed everything we ate; but as this everything was limited to salted mutton and pigeon, the cuisine was not after all very elaborate. We used to stew as many pigeons as the saucepan would bold at a time, (which I remember was about five, or four-and-a-half, according to size) and, the saucepan serving for a dish, to eat at them for two or three meals till all was gone.

We baked dampers in the hot ashes of a wood fire, mixing our flour by placing it in a hole punched with our fists in the yielding outside of a flour-bag, and pouring in water among the flour, till, with immediate stirring, and subsequent punching, it was reduced to a simple and remarkably tough dough. Damper, salt mutton, and pigeon, – salt mutton, pigeon, and damper, – we lived on for six months, three times a day, not thinking that harder times were still in front of us. So passed the summer and autumn, a time of bright exhilarating weather, and of constant employment and activity. I do not think we saw, during that time, more than four or five fresh faces, one (by the by) being a son of the late Sir T. D. Acland, who had taken up country

behind us on the ranges, and who was then generally looked upon as a harmless maniac for having done so. I need scarcely say that his run has since proved of considerable value. We shared our very poor shelter on the Harketere with him for the night, and bid him good speed in the morning, giving him our best wishes, and, – what was much more important, – a box of lucifer matches, of which he had run short.

As our first autumn in these new districts drew to a close, an unfortunate accident occurred, of which, as it happens to many early squatters, I will put the reader in possession. We were living, it will be remembered, in the interior of the country, in a low wattle hut with a thatch roof, in which were all our goods and chattels, simple and few, – but each one precious as gold, where we could get no more. One morning, one of the hands and I started out on the run in one direction, and the other two of the party in another, to find, and bring in, if possible, a wild mob of strong sheep which had broken away and been some days missing. Before starting we arranged a signal, often used up the country, agreeing that if either party found the sheep, they should make a smoke to telegraph the fact to the other; this is done by collecting dead and green grass, heaping it over pampas-grass (or scrub if obtainable), setting fire to the whole, and making the smoke as dense as possible. On the plains, this

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signal, in clear weather, can be seen with ease for ten or fifteen miles, and was, in our case, to recall either party to the assistance of the other; for wild New Zealand sheep require all available hands, to prevent their breaking away when found, and to steer them back again into the main flock.

It was a clear autumn day, and my party starting first, got over four or five miles at a good pace. My companion stopping for a moment to light his pipe, we took a careless look round, to see if the smoke-signal could, by any lucky chance, have been given so soon; we were surprised (and for a moment gratified) on seeing, directly behind us, a thick pillar of blue smoke rising steadily up into the still air-Wondering that the others had succeeded in finding so good a fire-bush, we at once began our return; but as we went, and were better and better able to make out the position of the smoke, – though neither of us at first uttered our fears to the other, – it began to strike us that the fire was dangerously close to our hut; and as we pushed hurriedly on, it became more and more clear that the fire arose from the very spot on which it stood. It took us three quarters of an hour to return; and by the time we neared home, the smoke had faded down into a thin pale vapour in the sunlight. Our hut was hidden, – till we were close upon it, – by a rising bank or terrace, and as we came breathlessly round this at a half-run, the worst we had feared unmistakably

met us, – for the old hut, which had sheltered us and all we had, was there no longer, and only a black square of smoking ashes was left to mark the place where it had stood. There were a few shapeless shapes lying about among the ruins, – a spade with the handle burning out in the socket, a cross-cut saw twisted into a red-hot curl, and one or two of the stakes of our bunks standing burning like torches; but everything else, – including flour, tea, bedding, tools, and stores, – was burnt to cinders. The only things we saved were a frying-pan, two quart pots, a little flour, one roll of blankets, and a saddle, which had been left at a distance from the hut; and a very little tea, not yet burnt out, in the centre of a large chest which stood in one corner.

The case was clear. We cooked in the open air. I had that morning specially warned the two members of the party whom we left cooking a damper to take with them, to pour a bucket of water over the fire before they started: this had not been done; the ashes of their fire were still alive; a passing breeze had blown a spark upon the thatch, which had instantly flared up like tinder, and burnt all we had to the ground. We had scarcely got back when the other party came in at a run, needing no words from us to understand, in an instant, all that had occurred. The fire had left us, close on the edge of winter, – when the sheep required constant shepherding, – almost entirely without either shelter or provisions.

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GOOD-BYE TO THE OLD HUT.

After the first hour of consternation which followed, it became glaringly evident that only the most active measures could pull us through so difficult a time. It was, of course, comparatively easy for the whole party to abandon the sheep and station, and make for the coast in a body; but upon this would have followed the loss of the greater number of the sheep, – for, unused to the run, and driven by winter storms, they would have scattered over the unstocked country, and few of them would ever have been again recovered. I myself was prepared to remain, – but without heroism, and principally from selfish motives, – for I was inclined to risk a great deal before presenting myself to my brothers, at the coast farm, to report the sheep all lost, and one half their small purse gone at a swoop. But I wanted one volunteer to stand by, and lend me a hand, and this volunteer was not wanting. It was agreed that two of our party of four should at once make their way to the coast, and procure fresh stores, so as to be back in about a fortnight's time, to reprovision us, and assist in erecting a hut (on a new site), the walls of which I and another volunteer, whom I will call C., were to commence with sods meanwhile.

This other volunteer whom I have named was a new colonial friend who had lately joined us, – an Exeter man, as good and staunch a fellow as ever trod, – and who stood by us like old William of

Deloraine, "good at need," through a deal of hard life that followed. And if ever any of my readers find themselves in the roughings of a new country, the best thing I can wish them is – as good a fellow-colonist at their side.

Winter Nights and no Roof.

THE half of our party who were going to the coast for stores, started on their journey and left us early one morning, towards the end of May, (a month equivalent in climate to the English November) and my friend C. and self started, an hour or two afterwards, for another part of the run, to form a new camp at a point from which the sheep could be more easily worked. We took with us an old pack-horse, carrying what blankets we had saved, a little flour, and the tea, the spade, the two quart pots, and our faithful frying-pan. About three o'clock we reached the new site, which was not half-a-mile from the foreground of the frontispiece. We pitched a blanket, – dug out a fire-place in a bank, – collected a

little brush-wood, sufficient to make a few minutes' fire, – had a pint of tea from our black tin pots, which served both for kettle and tea-cup, – crawled under our blanket, – and being very tired, slept hard till morning.

The third day from this, May 25, 1855, I find the following entry in my rough notes written on the spot. – "This morning, bread and meat, – wrapped in a cloth, and lying under our heads, – frozen so hard that we could not cut it with our knives; my boots under the saddle, 2 like iron cases, and frozen to the ground.

May 26. – Hard frost again last night: we were very cold. Ground like a brick this morning; almost impossible to cut sods for walls of hut. C. to sheep till noon, – sheep giving a deal of trouble."

For another week, day after day, much the same state of things continued; it was, in fact, our first experience of the mountain climate, and we were caught by severer weather than we had yet had to tackle, and frost settling down upon us much earlier than it had ever thought proper to do before.

On June 9th I find –

"During whole of last week trying to get up hut-walls at great disadvantage, – nights intensely cold, – everything under the blanket frozen hard every

morning." We had planted a "cache" of what flour we had left, at our burnt-down camp; and four days later, I find –

"Saturday, June 13 – We are out of flour, so struck our blanket, and down with pack-mare to old hut for more; raining heavily all day, – wet through, – found the ashes washed and blown away from the old site, and the earth-floor burrowed with rats: made a heap of brush-wood under the lee of an earth-bank and slept tolerably."

The next day, Sunday, June 14 –

"Remained at old hut, baking sufficient damper for a week, and washing a shirt."

Monday, 15th –

"Up at daybreak, – packed up damper, blankets, and a little flour, and back to new site; arrived about three o'clock, – found to our great disappointment that a large part of the hut walls we had put up had fallen down during the rain."

Next day –

"Hard at work repairing walls. We are rapidly getting out of tea, – for the last ten days have only used a little pinch to each daily, – the weather being so severe we feel the want of it very much."

Wednesday, June 17th –

"A very black threatening evening has been followed by a stormy night, the wind driving through our blanket. Raining heavily this morning, – everything in the tent wet, – no fire, – no tea, – cold

piercing wind. At noon, C. and self, in different directions, out to sheep which are driving before the wind and rain. Self back first, – fresh rigged the blanket, and collected scrub to try and make a fire by C.'s return, – succeeded, – and had a pot of weak tea each, with some bread and cold fat, eating it standing in the wet by the fire, till the rain put it out. Dray with stores overdue, – hope it will be here shortly."

Next day –

"No rain, – but black and gloomy, – heavy peals of thunder rolling away among the mountains. Working hard at hut walls."

Next morning –

"Black frost all night, – very cold, with flakes of snow. In the evening killed a sheep with our pocket-knives, – the butcher's knife having been burnt."

Friday, June 20 –

"Thaw last night. All round our tent a mass of slush, which oozes through in under; freezing hard again at sundown, – rough weather for an open camp. We are obliged to use two of our blankets to form a tent, so are compelled to sleep in our clothes, the cold being too great to sleep otherwise. Everything is regularly frozen up during the night, and the blankets we sleep in are covered with white rime every morning; we are obliged to sleep with our heads completely under the blankets, for if by

chance they become uncovered in the night, we are so hoarse and husky in the morning that we can scarcely speak."

Saturday, June 21 –

"Black frost again, – C. and self very stiff and cold all night, – the ground under us frozen, – and having left some water in one of our tin quarts, it had by morning frozen so hard as to burst the pot open, – this is a loss to us, as we have only two. Enough tea for one pot more, – must make it last for three days, by which time I trust that the dray, which is long overdue, will have arrived to reinforce us."

We had by this time been just a month on the spot, and having had twenty-eight nights of sleeping on the ground, in very bitter weather, with short rations of bread, weak tea, and mutton, (often frozen) we began to feel a good deal worn out.

On Sunday, 22nd; I find –

"Back again at old hut for last of our flour. Just starting back to camp next morning, when faint "cooee" 3 heard, and human being seen slowly fording the river below us. Turned out to be shepherd from the nearest out-station to us, (about thirty miles distant), who had pushed back in search of lost sheep. He had only found us out by seeing

the blue smoke of our camp fire, not knowing anyone was camped there. He says he heard from a native shepherd that the axle of the dray which the other half of our party are bringing up, was broken in crossing a river-bed, and that one of the party was ill. No chance of the dray being up for a fortnight. He says he is nearly out of provisions himself, but will bring us a little coffee, and a little flour, if we will meet him at a certain blasted tree, in the middle of a plain which lies between us. – Self started accordingly three days later, and reached the rendezvous-tree, after a long tramp, by noon. No one there. Waited two hours, and just on the point of giving it up, and getting back so as to be in before the night came on, when dot appeared upon the horizon, proving to be shepherd, true to his word. He could not spare us any coffee, – very glad to get a small parcel of flour, which he had, tied up on his saddle, in an old piece of shirt. We had no time to say more than "good luck" and then parted. – I do not think I have seen that good Samaritan since.

Got back very late, and steered for the last two miles by the light of a sort of scrub torch which C. managed to keep up."

Next day – I find in my journal –

"Deadly cold at six this morning, with driving wind from sou'-west, – rain and snow mixed, fell all night. Slept little. In the morning much

cramped, and cold all through. Couldn't make enough fire to boil any tea. Out to sheep all day, – they require constant watching. Found a log of dead wood, humped 4 it for a mile-and-a-half, – made a small fire, – turned into blanket, and slept till midnight. Then heavy snow began to fall in large flakes, – lay awake all the rest of the night, flinging the snow from the blanket by rapping it from the inside. In the morning much cramped. We are, in fact, getting very wretched, but C. says he will stand by with me, and not abandon the sheep till the dray party return."

Three days later we began to boil the twigs of a small shrub, – "manuka" by name, – drinking the rather nauseous concoction as a substitute for tea. We had a small iron pint pot, the lower half of which we used to fill with earth, and the upper with raw tallow, sticking into the mixture a nail with a piece of rag wrapped round it: this we used to light under our blanket after dark, standing it between us as we lay, and keeping it burning for an hour, before finally giving up to sleep. This part of the night was not (when it was not raining) so utterly unbearable, but we felt most the cold towards morning, and the eating of frozen mutton on turning out, – for from the scarcity and almost entire absence of fire-wood, we could rarely wait to get fire enough to

thaw our meat through in the morning, as it was necessary to be off to the sheep as soon after daylight as possible.

After this date, the weather, if anything, increased in severity, giving us great trouble in keeping the sheep together, and entirely preventing us from proceeding with the hut walls. We had eighteen more nights on the ground, with wet or frozen earth for a mattress, and winter clouds for bed-curtains; and though we were getting more and more wretched, and for some days had only had meat, – often frozen, – and no flour or tea, yet my good Exeter friend C. whom I have named, never flinched, nor gave me one word of complaint, but stuck to the sheep, and took everything as it came, and stood by me as a good, plucky, staunch Englishman I believe always would.

At last, – when we had got almost hopeless about the dray, and when in my own mind (seeing the possibility of serious issue) I had begun to contemplate the necessity of abandoning the sheep, and starting on foot for the nearest out-station, – late on a dark afternoon, as we were coming in from the sheep, we saw suddenly, about two miles from us, on the edge of some rising ground in front, a new object, which we knew was not always there. It was too late to see its exact outline, but we could make out that it was dark and low, and moved slowly along against the grey clouds beyond it.

We knew at once that it was our long-expected dray-party with the stores. Old C. cheered and threw his hat in air, but I was so wound up with the anxiety of the last forty-six days and nights, that something stuck in my throat, and I could not cheer; but we both hit out hard over the two or three miles that lay between us and the camp, picking up the dray-party as we went with a double hurrah and greeting, and steering it in through a belt of swamp to our poor and dilapidated camp.

Two tons of stores on a dray make a wonderful change in a camp which has been without anything.

That night we slept, as we thought, like princes. We stretched the dray-cloth, or tarpaulin, full-spread over the loaded dray, pinning it to the ground all round, and spreading heaps of wool-bales, which it had brought, underneath the wheels to lie on.

C. and I supped luxuriously off cheese and sardines (not frozen), and ship-biscuits; and as we had been destitute of anything but weak tea, we gladly drank a welcome to the dray-party in a hot can of whisky and water. And I think I am safe in saying that no gentleman nor even lady reader, nor the severest teetotaler living, would have refused it, after they had had forty-six December and January nights on Dartmoor, with starving commons, and nothing but a ragged blanket between them and the black winter sky.

Interval for Refreshment.

AFTER this, things took a long turn for the better, and less hard times hung about our cabin door.

In a fortnight's time we succeeded in finishing a second hut, adding, in the spring, a decent two-roomed house, – and in the summer a shearing-house, wool-shed and yards.

Three years went by on the run with varying fortunes, full of hard work, but still wearying and monotonous from solitude.

Meanwhile, the settlement itself, as a whole, progressed rapidly. Numbers of emigrants arrived yearly from England, and a good many old Australian hands, with a sprinkling of Americans, came down from Melbourne and the States, and the fires of the advancing settlers pushed every day farther and farther back upon the up-country tracts held by the squatters. Within sixty miles of our run we could get upon a real made road, and a pack-horse mail brought letters and papers once a week within fifteen miles.

This advance continued during an absence of a year-and-a-half in England.

Our return voyage, like all voyages, was insufferably long and weary; and though I must not bore the reader with any detailed account of it, still I cannot leave out the "crust" which follows.

Snares and Traps.

ALMOST everybody has his clever and wonderful brother, of whom you must hear with profound respect, – and what patience you can muster, – and I'm not quite sure I am altogether clear of this weakness. Anyhow, I know I have a brother who was at all events sensible and observant for twelve hours once, and as the safety or loss of two hundred lives was at stake, I may perhaps be excused for recording what then fell out.

This fore-named brother (whom I will at once call H., to prevent his relationship turning up again) was, with the writer, on his return voyage to New Zealand, – both having been previously many years in the island. A peculiarity of the atmosphere in the island is its extreme clearness;

so that far-off hills and ranges seem, to an unaccustomed eye, much nearer than they really are. The skipper of our barque was a very rough old sailor, who had been born and bred at Teignmouth, Devon, and had had many years of beating about on the fogged and dangerful banks of Newfoundland. He was just as weather-beaten and tough in disposition as he was in cuticle, and had a contempt (which could not be sounded with the deep-sea line), for the opinions of the article passenger on affairs of his ship, and the sea generally.

There is to the south of the New Zealand islands and about sixty miles from them, a compact clump of highish hills called "The Snares" the grassy top of some wave-scoured mountain below, springing up abruptly from the Atlantic, and forming what is called by men of the sea, a good "land-fall" after a long voyage; – that is to say, a good point to sight, so as to tell them where they are, after seeing nothing but water for a hundred days, and a hundred nights. There is also, about eighty miles to the nor'-west of them, a long low reef of treacherous and most fatal rocks, two miles in length, and only just awash at high water. They are called "The Traps" are twenty-two miles from any land, and open to the full sweep of the South Atlantic breakers.

After a long voyage, and many days of waiting and insufferable weariness, at last, at eight o'clock one bright and, as we then thought, blessed

morning, – for we were salt-water sick, and ocean-sick, and cloud-sick, and wind-sick, – we found, full and high above our bulwarks, great bold green hills of land. We could have leaped overboard to get to them, Nevertheless, prudence and a love of being dry prevailed; and the tar-lined decks – for four months worn by our feet – retained us.

But never mind about us, – the skipper is the person just now. He had, as he thought, ended his voyage; the anxieties of scores of stormy days and wild nights fell off his shoulder like a grind-stone from his back, and he became absolutely almost genial.

"How far are we from those hills?" said a rash passenger, venturing on the general gleefulness of the occasion to ask a whole question of the skipper.

"About twelve miles, ma'am," was cheerfully replied – to the wonder of that rash person's fellows, who stood about aghast at the venture.

Said H. to me, "We are thirty miles at least from those hills." Said I, "My dear chap, we are."

The skipper plunged into the saloon, and buried his fiery head among his charts and compasses. A few moments after, we heard him on deck sing out to the man at the wheel, "Nor'-East and by East," giving him that course or line as the one which the ship was to follow from our present position.

I shall never forget old H.'s face, when, after consulting our old Butler's School Atlas (of fifteen years ago), he came up to me and said, "That

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[Map] New Zealand. The Snares. The Traps.

course will take us right on the Traps." Said I, "My dear chap, I'm sure you're right"

Round came the ship's bows – from running nearly-due east – to the course his majesty the skipper had given.

A glance at the tracing which I told the printer to put here (I hope he has) will better show our position than any dry explanation of mine; it being clear that the same course from two entirely different points, – nearly twenty-one miles apart, – must take a ship over entirely separate water, though over parallel tracks; and if in one track there is a reef of rocks long enough to scrunch up a whole navy, it is also pretty clear that in that direction there is likely to be not a little uncomfortableness.

This was exactly the state of the case with us. The skipper's eye (which, together with its owner, had never crossed the line before) was accustomed to judge of distances by the misty atmospheres of the Newfoundland Banks, and had put down our position as about twelve miles from "The Snares" whereas H.'s eye (which, together with its honest and observant possessor, had crossed the line four times), taught by experience of the clear New Zealand air, informed him distinctly that the hills were at least thirty miles from us.

However – thirty miles or three – round went the rudder-wheel, down went the helm, and away went the ship, taking the first turning to the left, and

running away on her new course with a fair wind and a hissing wake astern, – the captain elated, and the new-chum passengers just as jolly as if they were already safe ashore. Not so cautious old H. – All the morning long, with his forehead wrinkled up like a coil of fencing wire, he paced up and down the deck, peering out ahead, and looking incessantly forwards over the side; going down every half-hour into our cabin below, and poring over the tattered old School Atlas; then coming up again and again to me with, "I'm perfectly certain we are running slap on the Traps; and most likely shall be upon them in the dark." I tried all I could to take a brighter view of things, though secretly I could not help agreeing with him down to the ground (if this simile be admitted on a wooden deck). At last he couldn't stand it any longer, and adventured an approach to the subject with the skipper in this way: –

"Ahem. Captain, I fancy we were rather a good distance off the Snares."

"About twelve miles, Sir" was the answer in a tone of despotic decision.

"The air about here is very clear, and the hills often seem very close."

No answer.

"I fancy we were twenty miles off." Awful pause.

"About TWELVE, Sir" And "Get a pull on your

weather main braces, Mr. Stiggins" (name of mate), terminated the attempt.

The skipper dived down below to his charts and compasses, and H. paced the deck again, anxious and discomfited.

As the afternoon passed, and the daylight faded out, H., who had carefully noted the pace at which the ship had been running, became most seriously and gravely anxious, – he never left the deck for a moment.

We had held a fair wind all day, the ship running hissing through the water as if she knew the voyage was nearly over. The sun had long left us alone, the evening shadows were fast falling over the great grey circle of sea through which we were running, and it was more and more difficult to distinguish anything amidst the wilderness of tossing waves ahead of the ship's bows.

A little after seven in the evening, the captain, one passenger, H., and self were alone on deck, the vessel lying heavily over on the lee side, and the wind, cold and raw, sweeping angrily through the rigging.

Suddenly – in an instant – as if bursting up from the deep sea below us, – heaving and frothing breakers sprang foaming into sight within half a stone's throw of our port bow. We rushed together to the side, and leaped upon the hen-coops; and as a huge, heavy wave, directly underneath us, burst

with a sullen roar, and sank seething away, we could plainly see the peaks of the sea-mountain tops, which stuck their merciless black crags up through the treacherous veil of foam. We had run straight upon the Traps.

The voice of the captain – an old and determined seaman – as he swung himself off the hen-coops and sang out to the man at the wheel to put the helm "hard down" was faint and husky with horror. It was a moment of life or death for two hundred souls. The look-outs on the fo'-castle having – at length, but too late – sighted the breakers, were wildly crying out: "Breakers close ahead! Breakers right under the bows!" – The rest of the crew, roused up from below, came rushing aft; but not before the ship's stern had swept within half her own length of the half-seen, streaming rocks. The greatness of our danger spread in an instant through the ship, and the passengers, white with fear, crowded up the gangways. For some minutes it was certain that only by a miracle we could escape total and fatal wreck. Every man on deck, passengers and crew, working instantly at the ropes, the ship had been rapidly put about, – and with her sails hastily clewed up, and her rigging and gear hanging in disorder, was surging heavily through the water, the black top of the reef breaking the waves almost directly in her wake.

It was still impossible to say, from the extent of

the reef, what portion of it we had struck upon, or whether we might not yet drive into a position where some of its peaks could not be escaped. The mates, stationed in the rigging and on the fo'-castle, kept a keen look-out ahead, and the captain, standing at the weather gangway, watched with staring eyes every speck of foam which broke upon the wave-tops. It was not, however, till two long hours had passed that the ship was considered clear of the reef; and the captain, poring over his charts, at the head of the saloon table, gave the passengers an idea of the danger they had escaped, by telling them that the ship had run direct upon "The Traps," and that had we struck the rocks – which in deep water, twenty-two miles from an uninhabited coast, we had only cleared by a few yards – the vessel and all in her would have gone down in three minutes, and that though he had seen forty years of hard life upon the sea, he had never yet shaved death so closely.

I can only say that, though we had been so long and so wearily longing for land, I never remember so devoutly wishing anything at the bottom of the sea as those black hideous crags which had so nearly gored open the plunging sides of our tossing ship.

This it is due that I say of old H. – That though he was the only man on board who had anticipated the danger, yet when it came he met it well. His

anxious forehead knotted itself into multiplied coils of fencing-wire, but he worked away hard at the ropes, and made no fuss, and was on deck all night, and took no spell till broad daylight showed us the great outline of the Southern Alps, heaved up above the horizon, as a guide and beacon to prevent us from drifting again into danger.

The skipper felt he had been wrong, but said not a word, – nor did H.

H. is a first-rate chap.

The advance which had begun before our return home continued during several years; but before recording their changes and chances, I must go back a little to earlier days, during which not a few rough times befell, a little intermingled, perhaps, with fore-signs of better days coming. A few notes of the joint experience follow in fellowship.

Whiffler.

AS the value of the back runs began to be proved, explorers pushed back in greater numbers into the interior to look for them: and the struggle and artifice used in securing them, and the confusion in awarding them (perhaps two or three years after application) were increased to an almost ridiculous extent. A single rider, perhaps, would be seen prowling about for weeks in a certain district, trying to fix the probable position, and reconcile the confusion of scores of other applications, all as yet unsurveyed and undefined. He would ride, watch in land, over rough, half-known country, trying to time his pace, and make a rude guess as to how far back the last claimant would come; but the last claimant would probably have a furious dispute with his front neighbour as to where his run would eventually be decided to end; and that neighbour would be at feud with his neighbour as to their boundary line; and each of these holders would have increased their first application by a second; and, – all squatters occupying subject to the country eventually proving to be there on survey, – not an acre of it was as yet legally laid off; so that

though the value of the runs became apparent by experience, the difficulty and confusion increased every day.

A friend of mine, – Whiffler by name, – late in the exploring days, when country was getting very scarce, - had been prospecting about, at the back of our run on the Harketere, for some days. At length, having made out a portion of country as open for occupation, he started back and stole away for town, to secure it by application at the Government Offices before any other claimant appeared. On his road down, upon the second day, he was overtaken on an open plain by a rough-looking, silent man, on a big grey horse; and from nothing that he said – for he said next to nothing – but from his manner, and especially from his silence, my friend Whiffler sorely suspected that he was going down on the same errand as himself. All that he could get out of his silent companion, in answer to enquiries as to where he had "come from" was that he "was going" down to town, – and all that the traveller of few words got out of Whiffler, in answer to questions as to where he (Whiffler) was "going" was that "he had just come from a station up behind there:" so that the total amount of satisfactory information mutually extracted was not, on the whole, altogether too instructive.

About half-an-hour after sundown, the man on the grey horse bade Whiffler adieu, stuck spurs into

his horse, and pushed away for the coast at a round pace. Old Whiffler saw at once that it was a clear case, – and that his chance of securing the run depended simply and entirely on his getting first into town. As soon, therefore, as the grey horse was well out of sight among the low stunted palms on the plain, he woke up his own horse to a real sense of the position, and headed away in a slightly diverging line for a small back-country hut or inn, about fifteen miles distant. He got in about ten o'clock at night; and as he rode up to the hut, the silent stranger was saddling his grey horse for a further push that night. Whiffler's horse was not over fresh, but after two hours' rest he started at midnight to follow. By two o'clock next day, he once more came in sight of the back view of the man on the grey steed, and urging his own horse to a last push, he passed him, – with about a quarter of a mile of plain between them, – at a steady trot. But after keeping the lead for about an hour, he found that his horse was too weak to hold it.

Now if Whiffler had an aversion, it was to being done; and on the edge of this unpleasant catastrophe he felt he was hanging. He therefore fell back upon a "ruse" to save the day.

On the further side of a stony river-bed, which he had just crossed, and where a rising ground placed him for a mile out of sight of his pursuer,

he stopped, and so bandaged his horse's fore-leg with his handkerchief and stirrup-leather, as to cause him to limp as if he had fallen among the rocks, – dismounting himself, and leading his disabled steed. The silent man came up, broke out into suddenly voluble sympathy for his misfortune, and bidding him at length good evening, trotted easily off, certain of victory.

The instant he was out of sight over a rolling down, off came Whiffler's handkerchief and stirrup-leathers, and away went Whiffler, by a short cut, over the fifteen or twenty miles still between him and town. He got in just as the Crown Office doors were closing. A book is there kept in which applicants for new country inscribe their names, runs being granted according to priority of inscription.

The first name which, on his arrival next morning, the silent man on the grey horse saw, in big letters, in this book, was the name of my friend Whiffler, whom he had left, – broken down and dismounted, – on the plains behind.

Whiffler was a lucky fellow, for he afterwards let that run for a thousand a year.

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WHIFFLER – HIS DODGE.

Plus Snow – Minus Fire.

ABOUT the time that Whiffler won his run, and some two or three years after the fire which had left us hutless on the Harketere plain, we had made some strides towards more comforting and civilised surroundings. We had secured a decent roof overhead, and found, occasionally, spare time for a day's sport at pig-hunting; and a week's visit to town, now and then, made the life pass more pleasantly. We had indeed advanced, by gradual steps, to that stage of civilisation which enables one to secure a something which at home, and in all finished dwelling-places of the world, is hardly noticed, but looked upon and partaken of as a pure and simple matter of course. We began, after a long course of very wholesale and patriarchal cookery, to institute and luxuriate in that very comfortable and appetising preparation – gravy!

Though we had a boy-cook, yet a friend and partner of the time made this luxury his special department. He was celebrated for two things: – his total want of knowledge of business, and the perfection of his acquirements in the knowledge of gravy. He was a plucky and fortunate colonist.

I remember him always with pleasure, and I certainly shall never cease to remember – his gravy.

He and I, however, even so late as this, got into some very gravy-less quarters at times. We were one day – after the commencement of the gravy period – caught in a heavy snow-storm. We had started with a dray and team for Alford forest, ten miles off, for a load of timber; and in the centre of a wide plain, the drift so blinded the horizon about us, as entirely to shut out all landmarks from sight. By degrees we utterly lost our way, and became so completely confused that we could no longer tell in which direction the mountains lay, or where the river cut a line through the plains. We could not see fifty yards in front of us; and the snow wrapt and concealed every feature by which we might have gained a clue. For two hours we drove on at hazard, striking at last right across the almost buried tracks which we had made soon after the storm came on. Just then, a wind – unmistakable from its coldness and almost fellow to the English Northerly gales – drove up from the South, and we knew at once in what direction we faced, and how to steer for the bush; – for the continued act of keeping the wind steadily driving against our left cheeks kept us in one line, and steered us direct-without circling, for the forest.

The tramp, however, was endless. The dray-wheels, clogged with snow, rolled and tumbled as

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PLUS SNOW, MINUS FIRE.

if going over boulder-stones. The fall was a good foot thick, and still gathering down, with flakes which – without advancing to the Munchausen – were as large as broad figs: and our track straggled over a plain white and blank all round, without a stick to, guide us, should the wind become too light to steer by. My friend (so celebrated for his gravy) was stuccoed all over with a rough-cast of snow, and except by one who knew him well, his distinguished form could not be recognised as that of the great gravy-artist of the South.

After six hours' tramp, as we neared the bush, the snow reached our knees, – for nearly a foot in depth had lain there before the present fall, – and it was with much difficulty that we got the dray and bullocks through it. However, at last, the dark semi-circle of tree-trunks at the forest edge loomed out suddenly through the drift, close upon us, and we found we had steered within a quarter of a mile of a low slab V hut, which we had knocked up there a short time before.

Nearly all that follows I take from my diary, just as it was scrawled on the ground.

"Unyoked and let go the team, – not much use unless they have a taste for snow. – An attempt to light a fire utterly failed, and (being without meat) two or three lumps of damper eaten, we pushed away the snow heaped against the door-way, (N. B. no door), and consigned ourselves to a mixture of

blankets, and a heap of fern which we had gathered and slept in a fortnight before."

[It is to be remembered that the hut, being only a low roof upon the ground, was not high enough to stand up in, and the party of three could only occupy it by lying down, covering the whole space as they lay.]

Next morning I find –

Sunday, June 12. – It is comparatively pleasant to turn out of soaked clothes, and into moderately dry blankets at night; but the reverse process at daybreak cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered luxurious. It is not pleasant, by morning light, to leave your lair, and re-introduce yourself into your soaked apparel, iced into stiffness by the night's cold; with the prospect, too, before you, of no fire to thaw, and afterwards dry them, and nothing visible outside a low breakwind hut but great reaches of country, wrapped in fresh-come snow. In fact, so hopeless did the whole prospect declare itself to be, that we again reversed the apparel process, and lay down – till the weather should clear – once more upon our lair.

"We had no meat with us, as we had hoped to pass the sheep on the route; but the storm had driven them to the other facing of the run. So a lump or two of damper and a few mouthfuls of snow, – eaten dry, – formed our carte for the day. My friend (who, I think I have said, was so distin-

2 The reader will remember that a saddle, steadied on each side by a boot, forms the exploring colonist's pillow.

3 The well-known Australian and New Zealand native call.

4 Anglice – carried on shoulder.

[Pages 91-120]

guished for his gravy) alluded in a general and discursive way to "Mulligatawny Soup;" he spoke, from an abstract point of view, of the established excellence of "Roast Turkey and Sausages," and was understood to add that "game," well roasted, and served with bread sauce, wasn't bad. But with damper to represent the solids, and snow as a substitute for the liquids he spoke of, the tendency of his conversation was exasperating; and a suggestion that its continuance would result in his being bundled out into the snow, induced him to turn round and go to sleep in his wet fern; where, however, occasional allusions to "Mulligatawny Soup" were at times indistinctly heard.

"The day was very, very long, but it did pass; and the black, still night which followed went its way too. All the while we never moved, but lay on the ground and waited till unconscious old Earth, not to be stayed or hurried for the sake of three insignificant men in the snow, had whirled round its great journey in space, and brought us up once more to meet the red rays of the morning sun.

"But before day came, we caught sound of a distant moaning among the hills, which betokened more good for us than the full sun. About three in the morning, an unsteady gust or two broke against the trees overhead, sending great loads of snow, from the branches above, down upon our breakwind roof; and as the snow blanched paler and whiter in

the coming sunlight, an unmistakable, warm, Nor'-west gale burst down over the hill-sides, twisting the tossing trees half way to the ground, – the snow streaming away the while, and sinking down by visible inches.

"At noon we began to load our dray, – pulling out the cut posts (for which we had come,) from among heaps of streaming drift; and as the sun dipped down through an evening haze, and purpled the snow upon the western hills, we yoked up our bullocks, and – knowing that now there was a warm house, ready supper, and a roaring fire waiting for us at the station, – we started as the moon rose, and got home as the Yankee clock, on our rough-hewn mantel-piece, pointed with both hands to midnight."

The last time I remember being at this forest was on a summer's day, nearly five years later, with a riding party, including two ladies. We rode to the spot of our camp, and found the remains of the old breakwind hut – tangled over with tall fern and creepers – half hidden from the daylight.

Though the day was bright, and the party happy, yet somehow it made me sad, as we looked at the tangled, weather-beaten old frame work.

Prologue – Short.

BEHIND our run on the Harketere, certain three men – by name "Cotton Roley," "Thomas Pellit" and "Samuel Cutler" – had taken up country: – all three good friends of ours, good colonists, and gentlemen.

The first was known to us, in comic phrase, as "the brown-gaiter'd Cosmopolitan, or the reckless swell" and he and his brother had many a night's quarters under our hut-roof.

The second was an explorer, who had seen some very hard times, and who, inside a sunburnt and wrinkled forehead, possessed far-thinking and acute brains, and for whom all sorts of forms of deeper modern thought had much attraction. He held exposed but extensive country on the upper Rangitata, (some forty miles behind our Harketere run) named from its river-boundaries" Mesopotamia"

The third man, though pale in face and light of hair, was a tough and active settler, against whom we could bring nothing but an entirely problematical and innocent gallantry, which is just touched on – under figure of a "Spear" – in the lines which follow. He worked hard upon a run known as the Flint Hills.

This being so – I had (one night when camping out) of these three men

A Peculiar Dream.

Dream set down.
I had a dream when all was still
But dissipated swallows,
A dream I may not dream again,
And so I set it down – as follows.

Time and place.
All round about the silver moon
The stars of night began to rally –
The only sound a rippling stream
That wandered sea-ward through a valley;

Roley appears;
Sea-bounded valley where I strayed, –
Hard by, there stood a cottage lowly.
Who is that party by the gate
With gaiters on? – why Cotton Roley.

his object.
"What dost thou here, my dear Cotton?
Whate'er it be, to me you'll tell it."
He answered, with a doubtful smile,
"I'm only waiting here for Pellit."

Cutler appears;
A little further on I strayed –
My dream, observe, is getting subtler –
With visage burnt, Scotch cap and all,
Whom should I meet, but Samuel Cutler –

his object.
"Gad zooks!" said I, "not at the Club?
Or safe at home with your sheep pens, O?"
"No!" he replied, "I took a stroll
To clear my brains of that Colenso."

Pellit appears,
He's mad, I thought, but nothing said,
(Whisper, ye breezes, while I tell it,)
For just behind a thick gorse hedge
There dawned upon me – Thomas Pellit.

and bolts;
He tried to bolt – but was too late, and, –
"None of that, my buooy" I holloaed;
He stopped, – and looked supremely calm,
When he found out that he was followed.

his feelings of truth appealed to.
"Pellit," I said – "look here," I said –
With solemn steps advancing slowly,
"Are you, or are you not come here
To-night to meet young Cotton Roley?"

His object
"What stuff," – said Pellit, – "He's at home;
For him don't you be in a fluster:
As far as I'm concerned, I'm here,
And camping out upon a muster."

is queried.
I didn't see his dogs at all,
But for the best I gave him credit;
To comfort him I said 'twould rain,
And bid good-night to Thomas Pellit.

* * * * *

Ye maiden –
Down in a glen, and by the sea,
Where mermaids sing their lullaby,
Fair as the stars, and close to me,
There passed a maiden silently.

her object,
"Stay, gentle spirit, evening star,
More bright and fair than all the others,
What dost thou here alone?" – She said –
"I'm only waiting for my brothers."

(Then, addressing me, she said:)

her brothers.
"Oh! ugly stranger, tell me now,
I pray thee tell to me,
If ever by this lonely beach
My brothers thou did'st see?"

Personal appearance.
"What are your brothers like?" I said,
"Unknown and lovely spirit;
Can you describe them? or perchance
You have their cartes de visite."

(Said she:)

of Roley,
Oh! one with beard and gaiters brown
Is called "the reckless swell;"
His mien is noble, and his hat
Is brown, I think, as well.

of Cutler,
"And one is burnt like black pine wood
Bronzed in a bushman's fire;
His forehead, when he frowns, is like
A coil of fencing wire.

(his beard and hat)
"His beard is black, and black his hair;
His hat I used to carry –
It was sometimes, I recollect,
A very small Glengarry.

of Pellit; his gallantry.
"My other brother, pale and fair –
All happy thoughts betide him –
Has ridden lately with a 'Spear,'
A fair slight 'Spear' beside him.

again his gallantry.
"He talks about the hills of Flint,
And says he loves them dearly;
I often think he loves his 'Spear'
More closely and more nearly.

Ye maiden is weary,
"But I have seen of all the three
Not one this evening dreary,
Though I left my cot as the sun went down,
And have wandered till I'm weary."

& discouraged;
"Oh, maiden fair, I weep to say
None come of all the cluster;
One waits a friend – and one is mad –
And one is on a muster.

"At least by your description fair,
I think I met the parties,
About a mile from here, just where
You see that horse and cart is.

her statements doubted.
"But, lovely vision, they were not
A bit like one another,
And neither of them looks at all
As if he were your brother."

She falters.
She drooped her lashes o'er her eye,
The starlight seemed to darken:
"I meant to say my cousins – but –
Who's coming? – hearken – hearken!"

Cotton dawns.
A bold quick step – she knew it well –
And so did I. I got on
Behind the hedge in time to see
That very party – – – Cotton.

I intervene
A low sweet cry from her there came,
He to his breast had held her;
But I stept out serenely bland
Beneath the hedge of elder.

and explain.
"Cotton," I said, "brown-gaiter'd friend,"
You're under a delusion,
This is not Pellit whom you seek,
But some one else." – -Confusion

He collapses.
And utter chaos round him fell,
His mare stood near him saddled,
He jumped upon her – strove to speak,
Looked ghastly – and – skedaddled.

Effect on ye maiden.
I thought she'd faint – I scarce had time
To offer fragrant Rimmel, –
When steps approached – I hid again,
Like shade of Peter Schimmel,

Cutler comes,
Cutler came on, his face lit up,
"My own, my life!" exclaiming;
I rather turned the point of this,
Myself the welcome claiming.

It was too bad, I will allow,
To break such hearts asunder;
But I cannot answer for my dreams,
So cease, I beg, to wonder.

and is calm,
Cutler – as from a leafy shade
I stept – assumed the bearing,
The cool calm bearing that he wears
In the very midst of shearing.

and polite.
He raised his hat (he's lately bought,
A hat that does him honor),
Politely smiled upon his love,
And, – vanished round the corner.

SCENE
Oh, then indeed there was a scene,
The lovely being fainting, –
A lily now, and then a rose
Her velvet forehead painting.

Pouncet box.
At length she spoke – I freely gave
Of "Jockey Club" the Bouquet, –
But sounds approached, I skipped aside
Like Walker christen'd Hookey.

Pellit!
The green leaves fluttered as he came,
The stars before him fell – it
Seemed as though a ghostly air
Passed by to herald – Pellit.

He speaks.
He speaks – "At last I find thee here,
My own my long lost treasure;
My heart is thine, take all my wealth." –
"Just so" – said I " – with pleasure."

* * * *

I am taken down
This heart is dead – a Byron I,
Nor love nor fear feeling,
Yet must I own I felt a shock
Of dread around me stealing,

several pegs.
A blast of fear when Pellit raised
His arm – in mid-air waving –
"Stand clear!" said he, "when riled,
I'm not Particular to a shaving."

A hit!
A moment more, and I had lost
My head, and caught it rather, –
A lucky hit preserved my life
From any further bother.

I touched the lovely startled cause
Of all this wild commotion,
Looked in her eyes, and said – "His Spear –
He's lost it, I've a notion."

How he shrank,
As shrinks the snow before the sun,
The star beneath the billow,
As droop away the falling leaves
In autumn from the willow, –

and hooked it;
As vanish hills in winter time,
Shrouded by fog and drizzle,
So shrank and drooped young Pellit then,
So did young Pellit mizzle.

ditto maiden.
Only a moment did she wait,
The peerless unknown beauty,
Then fled away again I ween,
To cottage, home, and duty.

Toilet.
I passed the cot, and by the shade
About the curtain roaming,
I've reason to believe that she
Her golden locks was combing.

All three
A very little further on
Cutler I met, – and Roley
With Pellit talked, and all three walked
With solemn steps and slowly.

are addressed.
"Holloa!" I said – "We've met again,
I hardly like to greet you," –
"You'd better not," said they, "you'll just
A catch it when we meet you."

Seriously.
"What for?" I said, "One said that he
Was mustering, – and another
Took but a stroll, – while one of you
Was going to meet the other;

"Yet all at once, each after each,
Each other's footsteps skirting,
Meeting one maiden by the sea,
With fast and furious flirting.

"Perish my hopes! – I thought that you,
Mesopotamian squatters,
And dwellers where the Ashburton
O'er shingle runs and potters,

"Were all above that sort of thing
On Rangitata Upper;
Or if poetic dreams were yours,
You only thought of Tupper,

Practical deductions.
Yet here, young Pellit, let me draw
Some practical deductions;
And listen, Roley, if you will,
To these few brief instructions; –

Moral.
When by the sea the loved one waits,
And you go out to meet her,
Be sure that there is no one else
Beside yourself to greet her.

"When individuals you find
A stroll by moonlight taking,
Don't you believe them if they say
They're only musters making.

Lastly.
"And lastly, note – that spirits fair,
Lovely as Cupid's mother,
Don't by the stars awaiting stay
Only to meet their brother.

Good-bye.
"And now, goodbye, – adieu, – adieu, –
I see the moon appearing;
Go quickly back, – these maxims note,
And get on with your shearing;

"Particularly Pellit"

This I holloaed from a distance, as in my dream I found myself caught up into the air, and sailing away majestically nowhere.

N. Z., 1861.

Last Day in Harness.

ABOUT this period the labour of the up-country settlers was a good deal lightened, and a decided element of enjoyment created by the greatly increased number of their horses. All the stations reared stock for their own use, and we kept a running mob of about forty, all bare-footed except those in immediate use. Being beyond the reach of a smith's forge, the half-dozen kept in use were shod on the spot, and – speaking diplomatically – I held the blacksmith's portfolio for some years. In order to tame them and attach them to the run, we encouraged among them a taste for salt, an intense weakness for which they rapidly acquire. They ran on the open country, and from their feeding ground, three or four miles away, would come rattling back at all sorts of odd times to have a kettledrum of salt, sweeping sometimes at night up round the house like trampling demons, with a perfect thunder of galloping.

One of their number (old Wild Dayrell) I must not forget. He was ten years old when we bought him in the early days; he was a most perfect stock-

horse, and would ride after wild cattle, and as they twisted to escape, dodge and turn them with extraordinary skill, – the reins loose on his neck, – leaving the rider to use his stock-whip and keep his seat. I am almost afraid to chronicle that the old horse would twist round on his heels, at a hard gallop, within the space of a billiard table; but he did so, and dodged the racing cattle with the most faultless skill. He did us eight years incessant work, and never failed; steering across misty country, and taking high rivers with a sagacity really more than human. We proposed to give him a retiring pension of oats and shelter, and merely used him now and then as he grew old, to get in the broken-in bullock teams; but one day the bullock driver, being anxious to make an early start to get over a rising river, pushed him a little hard in bringing in the team; coming back, Wild Dayrell did what he had never done before, – he lagged at the spur, – a little farther on he bore his head heavily upon the reins, and within sight of home slowly stopped, – kneeled quietly down under the rider, – and sank upon the ground, trembling to his hoofs. The driver raised his heavy head and tried to rouse him, but the old fellow had seen his last morning, and still bridled, and saddled, and at his post, stretched out his head, and died there among the dew-laden ferns.

It is a hard thing to think that the faithful life of our time-tried, four-footed friends makes no record

in the future, and I know that when he died, all the men believed that if there were for horses a hereafter of happy feeding-grounds, there would be there a sheltered and sunny paddock, watered with sweet water, – for old Wild Dayrell.

Cold Bishop.

JUST about this time, our part of the country saw what it had certainly never seen before – a real, actual, very Bishop, – the Bishop of Christchurch, – step upon its soil; and a sign it certainly was of the advance of the Province. But he arrived very little as you would have supposed a Bishop would come, and in very way-worn and sorry plight. He had been taking the first interior tour of his diocese; and on his way up from the extreme southern boundary, had taken our station as a halting place on his route. But there had happened to his lordship what will happen, in a new open country, even to a Bishop – he had lost his horse.

Now the grand up-country rule when you have

lost your horse is a colonially established maxim. It is this: "Hump your saddle and look for him" which being translated into English English, means simply, – "Lash your saddle to your shoulders by the stirrup leathers, like a knapsack, and just tramp till you find him, – or do not find him, – as the case may be." But when the Bishop arrived, foot-sore, cold and way-worn, and without his horse, we saw at a glance that it was one of those brilliant exceptions which establish a rule, and was clearly a case in which all standing orders must be immediately waived in his favour.

We at once offered the Bishop a fresh horse for the morning, – we prepared for him our best bunk, – we heaped fresh wood upon the hearth, – insinuated that a well-hung saddle of mutton, (the delicate aroma of which already floated from an adjoining cooking hut,) would shortly appear, – and above all, my enthusiastic friend, and amateur Soyer, prepared for his Right Reverence his most enticing and finished gravy.

The Bishop rested by our fire-side, – slept soundly that night under our thatch roof, – and breakfasted next morning with an appetite that brooked no trifling. Our horses were running four miles off, but we stockyarded them soon after sunrise, took out and saddled a steady hack, and while the day was yet early, saw our guest on his way, fresh-mounted, and heard his goodbye with regret.

No Hope.

Yet, long after many civilising influences had spread their way up into the country, and made the life less hard and less dangerous, something would occur which would warn the settlers into caution, and remind them that the country was hardly yet civilised into safety.

Just before the discovery of gold on the West Coast, a Government survey party was sent out to explore across the country, for a feasible road through the heart of the Alps. They started, and on the route, after a few days' journey, sent back a young and active member of their party with a so-far report of their progress. He got back safe and well to the very base of a range of hills within sight of our hut on the Harketere, and about four-and-twenty miles from it. But there – in getting down over a bank, or terrace, in the neighbourhood of the river which ran below, – he tripped and fell, – slipped but a few feet to the ground, – but this one little step he paid for with his life. His leg had twisted under him as he fell, and on trying in great pain, after a few minutes, to rise, he found that his right leg was broken and powerless. He was a day's journey

from the nearest station, and it would be sad to stay and tell how it gradually dawned upon him that he could not save himself, and that he must not hope; and how a fierce thirst came and tortured him away from sleep. But day after day, for four days, as he lay there dying, though he never lost his courage, he pencilled a diary, in his note-book, full of great sorrow. The last line could hardly be read, for his failing hand had trembled very much, but the words "thirsty" and "water" could be made out, and he was found some way from his note-book and cloak, having tried, spite of his great agony, to drag himself to the river. But he had never reached it, and towards evening, worn out with pain, and a long way off from home, he had given up his young life, with only the high stars and great mountains looking down on him, as the last tired throbs of his heart beat away into the night air.

After this, but too late, a rescue party found him, and buried him reverently, and a stone marks his grave.

I did not know him, but I think he was a true and good fellow, for afterwards, those who did know him, though he had died, said of him, – "All is well."

The Black Eyes of Parker.

NOTWITHSTANDING the improvement which the advent of a live Bishop naturally argued, about this time ludicrously upside-down phases now and then peeped out. One morning we rode down to a neighbouring station about twelve miles off, stock-yarded our horses, and knocked at the station-owner's door. He opened it, and we walked in. As soon as we could see his face clearly, we found his right eye discoloured, and partly closed, and his whole countenance bearing evidence of a most unmistakable pugilistic encounter. "Holloa, Parker!" said we, "you've got the influenza!" – "No," he explained, "I haven't got the influenza, but this morning, before breakfast, I've had to fight my bullock-driver, and though he's left a black seal or two upon me, I've so obliterated him that he can't see at all, and at present he's spending his spare time in the application of raw mutton chops to his face and eyes."

The driver in question had come to give notice to leave, and in the owner's own house had become so abusive that Parker had proceeded to

eject him. An encounter followed, ending in the mutually satisfactory and agreeable manner I have described; and notwithstanding the state of Parker's countenance, the whole thing struck us as so unspeakably absurd, that we laughed till we reached that peculiar stage of laughing when one gets an hysterical stitch in one's ribs, and wishes one had never begun to laugh at all.

We catch it.

On the 4th April, 1860, I find the following, almost word for word, in my note-book: –

"Packed Black Bess with blankets, bread, meat and tea, and started (C. and self) for the sheep, to move the whole mob about twelve miles down to fresh ground. The country on the route was very rough and tangled, and as it would take us two days to get the sheep through, we took blankets, &c, for camping."

"Reached sheep about two o'clock, – rounded them up and began driving at once. Reached our proposed camping-ground about sundown."

"It was early autumn; the day had been fine and

clear, and even hot; we had had no water, so struck down to the river, about a quarter of a mile off, to drink, – leaving the sheep feeding in a hollow. While there, wind suddenly shifted to the sou'-west, and a heavy bank of clouds began to drive up. Saw we were going to catch it, so hurried back to the camping-ground, and with some difficulty procured a few sticks, over which we threw one of our blankets. Rain came on before we had well prepared for the night; – gave up any idea of fire, – weighted our blanket all round with heavy stones, to keep it down against the wind, – and crawled underneath. Came on very dark, with rain and driving wind. Being tired, tried for about two hours to sleep, but by degrees it got extremely cold, gradually advanced to the unmistakable freezing-point, and the rain, which up to that time (eleven o'clock) had been falling heavily, changed to a thick and rapid fall of snow. Knocked about, pretending to sleep, for about two hours more; then finally woke up, and discovered that the snow, by a private passage known only to itself, had insinuated itself in considerable quantities into our establishment, where it melted rapidly, and placed us in the inconvenient position of lying in a demi-freezing puddle of water, – no doubt an enviable one for a believer in cold water cures, but it seemed to strike us, under the circumstances, as being peculiarly undesirable and inconvenient."

[Inserted unpaginated illustration]

WE CATCH IT.

However, we had but three choices. Either to remain where we were (in pond aforesaid), – turn out in the drifting snow and fresh pitch our camp, getting everything full of snow in the operation, and being quickly swamped in a fresh pond, – or, as a third and last resource, break camp, pack up, and endeavour to find our way, through the night, over the ten miles which lay between us and the hut.

The second alternative was bad, and the last we knew was hopeless, for it was so pitch dark that, over country without a track, we could only lose our way in the snow and wind, and perhaps get knocked up, and serious consequences ensue.

I crawled out of the wet blankets and looked at the night. An unbroken sheet of snow lay all around, and droves of flakes were whirling thickly down through the air.

We were camped in an old river-bed, and the uneven surface of the shingle, and the huge boulder-stones which lay about, whitened with the fall, – added to the unchecked roar of the wind and the blackness of the night, – made a picture the utter wildness and dreariness of which it is impossible to describe.

It was, however, glaringly clear that no choice was safely left us but to remain where we were. The wind screamed through our blanket and tugged heavily at the stones which held it down; and for some time we sat up and held the frame-work, by

main force, to the ground. Towards three o'clock the wind moderated, but we passed the night very cold and wet, and broke camp at the first peep of daybreak. Morning was indeed welcome, but the actual turning out was bitterly cold: the wind blew in icy blasts from the mountains, now sheeted from base to summit with snow; the sky, blackened still with heavy clouds driving up from the sou'-west, looked doubtful and threatening, and any idea of shelter or fire on the spot was simply hopeless. So we hastily rolled up our soaking traps, and started through the snow for home, eating as we went what scraps of bread and meat we had left, and on getting under the hut-roof, after our savage night, looked upon its rough walls as a perfect shelter, meet and fit for princes.

FROM among many letters written about this time, and found many years afterwards – though little worth – faithfully stored up at home, I take the following: –

Hexameters – Not Warranted.

Sisters, and those who would come to this island entitled New Zealand,
Listen, and hear for yourselves the change and the place that await you; '
Change that you have not experienced yet while at home you have sojourned;
Place that, although I describe it, all undescribed will continue.

First, there is air here, – and so is there air in old England.
And there is earth, – brown mould that you dig and plunge into with ploughing, –
Earth that you shift with the trowel, – and earth that you make into flower-beds.

And there is water, – soft water, hard water, pump water – upcoming
From unknown dark wells, in time to the jerk of pump-handle:
Water as rain slow falling, and rain perpendicular driven,
Driven by howling sou'-wester; – yes, there is rain, and wind also,
Just as you have in old England; – wind that is balmy, agreeable, –
Strong winds and fresh, – and winds that are maddening, distracting.

Fire there is here as well, which you poke in the grate with a poker,
Which boils you a vesper tea-kettle, which "cook" cannot light in the morning,
Which at midnight will burn you a house down, or shine from a composite candle.

Yes, – this is all here, – and with it are mixed human beings,
Beings who eat, and who drink, and who speak, and who turn the eye upwards,
Not downwards, or sideways, but beings who principally use it
To see after dear number one, and keep a look-out on the main chance.

It must be remembered, however, from these elementary matters –
Water, and fire, and air, and earth, and human bipedals –
Endless varieties spring, and ramifications uncounted.
For water appears too oft disguised, (also sometimes invisible)
Mixed and disguised with spirits which cannot be hailed as incorporate,
For their mission appears to be, as soon as they're born from the hogshead,
To enter a body at once and fill corporations expectant.

Also the element water appears to the settler observant
Embrowned in the homely cup that cheers but does not inebriate,
Poured out as tea into fairest of cups – snow-white with gilt edging –
Sweetened with lumps of sweet crystal, creamily mingled and modified,
Soothing the mind and the palate, and gliding refreshingly downwards.
And it presents itself fiery raw, from rusty tin pannikin, –
Tasting of solder, in bright new can just made by the tinman, –

Boiled in the pot that is drunk from, – or poured from gigantic tin tea-pot,
Milkless, and scalding, and raw, and blackened with tea by the fist-full.

Then again water will meet you when you go forth in the morning,
After a winter's night, when lakes and lagoons unexpected,
Lakes, and bays, and arms of the sea are possessing the highway-
Little you know till you try what it is to attempt locomotion.
Gone are the pavements, gone the broad flags of old England,
Only the crossings are swept, and torn by a howling sou'-wester,
Tearing the flying hat from the head all bewildered and furious,
Twisting the feminine dress, and displaying the boots of Balmoral.
And water appears again, a positive bother and nuisance,
Rolling in milky-brown volumes through rivers you want to get over;
Want to get over and can't, – for bridgeless and ford-less the torrent,
Insultingly lapping the stones which a precious long way from the water

Yesterday dried in the sun, dusted over with sand as they should be.
So, stuck up you remain, anathematising in secret,
Also not blessing in public, nor using the mildest expressions,
Because the confounded river got up before you in the morning.

Nor is the element water done with yet, nor disposed of:
It has a way of appearing when, trustful, you think you are safe from it,
Leaving the thin-shingled, wind-beaten, weatherboard roof of the minster,
Trickling and dripping at church-time on much-cherished bonnet of lady,
Finding its way down back of child who commences to holler –
Holler and bawl till removed to squall and to bawl in the distance.

Water too sometimes exists where it ought to be carefully wanting, –
At least I was yesterday told so by an old and experienced digger,
A man with a sun-burnt face, and beard all tawny with weather,

Bearing a swag of blankets and bound for the Waimakariri.
He was refreshing himself with a "nobbler" before he departed:
Boldly he poured out the brandy, a liberal, plentiful glassful;
Careful as if it was gold-dust, he warily added the water.
I verdantly questioned him why he made such peculiar arrangements:
He saw I was green as the grass, – and regarding me slowly he pointed
With significant thumb o'er his shoulder to the landlord, and cautiously answered: –
"Perhaps they have watered the brandy, but I know they've not BRANDIED THE WATER."

So much for water, and the way it appears in New Zealand.
A word or two now about fire, and the duties the element renders.
If an idea possess you that when you arrive in the Island
You will sit calmly, in peace, in front of a warm blazing fire, –
A flaming, respectable, well-pokered, glowing assemblage of hot coals,

[Pages 121-150]

Heating the bars of your grate, and shining all. ruddily through them,
Flickering warmly on paper, and pictures, and curtain-hung window, –
If this be the fleeting delusion you cherish, – abandon it ever;
(A truer colonial than I perchance would have told you to "drop it")
For anxieties hang by the doubtful fire of emigrants,
And tears of smoke and of bitterness drop by the hearth of the colonist.

For firstly, – you may have no house where your chimney and hearth are erected,
Or if you've a house, you may have no chimney within it, –
Or if you've a chimney, the smoke may decline to observe it, –
Or if you've the chimney, you may have no timber to kindle, –
Or your wood may be wetted, or green, and refuse to be lighted; –
Or if with a house, and a hearth, and firing, and chimney you manage
To start up a glowing blaze and hopefully sit to enjoy it,
Saying with glee: "Ha, ha! this is something like comfort" –
Suddenly, – like to the touch of a cold steel bar on your shoulder,

An icy draught, rheumatic and chilling, plays right on your back-bone,
Entirely disturbing and putting to flight your fancied enjoyment.
Or haply the boiler that you have confidingly left on the embers,
While you are gone from the room to get out a knife and tobacco,
Topples with hissing and crashing into your hardly-gained fire,
Blackening the glowing coals, and making the ashes a plaister,
Leaving a black sodden pool, with floating charcoal on the surface,
Returning your gaze with despair when you come with your knife and tobacco.

But fire, oh English sisters, has here a perpetual altar,
A constant eternal shrine, where torches undying are lighted,
Lighted and kindled afresh before they have time to extinguish,
If not by the Vestals of Delphi, at least by the Vestas of Letchford, –
Lighted with vestas, and fusees, and corners of paper, and embers,

Kindled with lighted sticks which always appear to die out
Just as the anxious smoker puffs at the stem of his meerschaum, –
Meerschaum I say, – but ah! not alone in the case-guarded meerschaum
Burn the eternal fires lit to the King of Tobacco:
No, – in the pipe of clay with long stem, and short stem, and no stem,
In the ingenious work of art with head of a monkey depending,
In the short little curving pipe, like a capital S with a bowl to it,
In the cigar, in the pipe of thorn, in the well-flavoured "Milo,"
In the pipe with tin stopper attached, in the heavily-mounted and silvered,
In the pipe with transparent stem, and well-finished mouthpiece of amber; –
In these and in hundreds of others, at morn, and at noon, and at midnight,
At home by the quiet hearth, abroad by the market of merchants,
(That is to say the market that was, it's a market no longer,
Only a post-office now) but the fires of incessant tobacco
Circle about its doors, and follow the wandering noses,

Noses of all who pass, or wend up the street of Colombo,
Bid at the auction of horses, or enter the flag-mounted sale-room; –
Still as they wander, the incense that's burnt in a hundred of censers,
Curling, winds to the nostril, winds to the nose without ceasing.

Nor if you leave the town do you leave the altars behind you;
Burn everlasting fires, both stronger and faster than ever,
The further you get from the town, and reach the wool-growing interior; –
Masters, and shepherds, and shearers, and cooks, and drivers of bullocks,
Sawyers, and stockmen, carpenters, packers, and shinglers, and loafers,
Smoke as they work to assist them, and then knock off for a "smoke oh!"
If you but stop for a second to speak to a smokeless inhabitant,
While he replies, his hands, with a slow and mysterious movement,
A hidden something silently roll, and unravel with rubbing;
That unseen something is the eternal weed that is kindled,

"Cavendish" called, I believe, sometimes, though I don't know what that means;
"Dew of honey" is, I am told, incessantly offered,
And I hear that "eyes of birds" are incessantly placed on the fires,
And "twisted head of negro" guillotined by a ruthless chopper, –
Horrible to relate, – is minced and placed on the altar.

Earth I have said's represented in this Pacific-washed island,
And so you will early find with a most unmistakable vengeance;
For on stepping on shore, and proposing to enter the country,
A slight excrescence of earth, commonly known as the "Port Hill,"
Will present itself to your sight, and request to be clambered.
It's perfectly frightful to think of the state of one's muscular tissues,
As this gigantic machine for taking it out of new comers
Is toilingly, sobbingly clambered, with bitter groans and exhaustion;
Turn after turn it winds, and the faint and ship-weakened traveller
Thinks that the top is ever his anxious struggles eluding:

Ah! but when he gains the top, let him look to the state of his muscles,
For they will be shaken, and twitch, and tremble worse ere he reaches,
Reaches the valley's foot and stops at a wind-beaten hostel.
Ah! let him live out his full ripe age, will be never forgotten,
Never forgotten his first ascent of the "Emigrant's Treadmill."

Earth too haply will meet him in converse ratio shortly;
For as he drives up the long straight track that leads from the mountain,
Minute millions of grit, and sand, and cart-pounded shingle,
Driven by shrieking nor'-wester, will find a retreat in his eyelids;
And while he tries to remove them with hopeless corner of handkerchief,
Rolling boulders of stone will jolt and confuse his perceptions,
Plainly proving the fact, as the rattling conveyance advances,
That earth, in the shape of shingle, exists in spite of the Road-Boards
And let him venture to live by a river-bed edge, or a back street,

He will discover an earthy sand omnipresent and gritty,
Whirled by the summer wind through invisible crevice and cranny,
Coating his table, his chair, his chimney-piece, sideboard and book-case,
So that upon them his children draw horses and men with their fingers;
Appearing too like pepper on all his papers and letters,
Dusting his melting butter, and hid in the crust of his quartern,
Floating on top of his milk, and lying await in his tea-cup,
Strewing his beard and hair, and spreading his countenance over,
Imparting a pallid, dried-up look to his wind-beaten visage,
And grinding between his teeth as homeward he comes of an evening.

Earth has another important office which she has to render,
For she is cut into endless plots, and sections and properties;
Capital spots for villas, and shops, and sites residential:
Frontage for inns, and bars, and hotels at corners commanding,

Commanding a first-class site (that is to the eye of the seller),
Also commanding a first-class price (in the buyer's opinion).
Chopped up, and cut up in all sorts of ways is the earth that we tread on;
Local reserves for a park, and miles of reserve for a railway,
Blocks of reserve for coal, sections for stations, and light-house,
Blocks of land for a dipping reserve where scab is walked into,
Camps where passengers hopeless go through a quarantine wretched,
Sites for schools, and church, and market-place, – minus a market,-
Bridle paths, cross roads, roads by rivers, high roads and by-roads,
All by-the-bye out-crying aloud for repairs and for metal,
Crying aloud and long to Road-Boards deaf and unheeding; –
Even so is earth cut up in sections uncounted,
And so will she be cut up as long as the colony's dwelt in.

And now, oh fair sisters of England, I am forced to pull up for the present.

The mail-boxes shut up at twelve, and I must shut up at eleven, –
So take what I send, and forgive me the faults of the sender,
And believe me that now, as of yore, I faithfully yours am and will be.

N.Z., 1864.
L.J.K.

Settling the Question with a Lucifer Match.

FOUR years we remained upon the run on which our first hut had been burnt to tinder, and where we had had so many winter nights upon the ground, – and for all the four years, hard days we had of it, and hard nights, and hard fare.

During the earlier days of this time, a certain brother of mine had joined me in the not very attractive partnership of difficulty. This being so, I got eighteen months' spell, as I have said, to clamber back to England again. Meanwhile, he

and a partner pushed back pluckily still further into the interior; and at considerable risk, and with great difficulty and exposure, discovered and stocked forty thousand acres of mountain country, almost in the very heart of the main ranges of the island.

I will just record one out of the many rude experiences they met in stocking it.

Scab had broken out among the sheep in the Province, and as the law insisted upon the country being stocked, but disallowed the driving of infected sheep for the purpose, it was necessary to go one hundred and eighty miles for clean sheep. On starting from the station from which he took them, my said brother drove by a circuitous route still further into the interior; for, it being impossible to get the sheep through in any other way, without passing infected country, he had determined, – backed up by my staunch old friend C, – to push his way over a rugged branch range of mountains which had never yet been crossed with stock. On arriving, at length, at the base of the lower spurs, he and his party were brought to a difficult and unexpected halt; for the country was so tangled and overgrown with rough growth and scrub, that – as it was – it was impossible to force the sheep or even the horses through, by any possible means. Going back was not to be thought of, with scab and failure in the rear. C. and he resolved, therefore, to fire the jungle, and find afterwards their way across, through

the burnt country, at the risk of being without feed for their stock on the route.

Towards evening, they drew the sheep down into the bed of a small river which wound under the base of the range; and leaving the two hands they had with them to keep the flock closely rounded up, they broke down low, withered shrubs with bushy heads, and lighting them into a blaze, drew them along the ground at the edge of the rank growth which clothed the hills. The wind was favourable, and by lighting at intervals for about a couple of miles, the whole line caught, and a hot, roaring belt of fire blazed up the hill-side, hissing and crackling, – and as C. declared, absolutely screaming human screams, – as the thick untouched jungle of scores of years withered and twisted in the flames.

All night long the fire roared away upon the hillside, and all night long their solitary camp in the river-bed was lit up by the red, glaring light; till, towards morning, the fire had driven over the summit of the ridge, and only a great spreading line of rolling smoke showed where the flames were opening a way for them beyond.

At daybreak they started, – the country still shimmered over with smoke, – and the tramp of the sheep throwing up clouds of black dust from the thick bed of ashes below.

They drove fast all day, – their progress, however, checked by deep, running streams in the sides of the

range, – and, black as chimney-sweeps from the clouds of flying soot, they camped at night close to the fire, in a valley which, from end to end, was scorched and blackened with the flames.

They were obliged to keep a double watch all night to prevent the sheep, wild and ravenous for feed, from breaking away; and they started by moonlight, at three o'clock the following morning, striking across the hills in the wake of the still burning fire, and reaching open country which they knew, on the other side of the range, by nightfall.

A long but successful drive of nearly five weeks placed these sheep upon the country newly taken up, known then and since as "Burke's Pass," and one or two pictures of which the next few notes do their best to pencil.

Burke's Pass.

THE last fifty miles of this drive passed through half-explored, wild mountain-country which lay, in round numbers, about a hundred and fifty miles from the first coast settlement: from its elevation, and position further to the south'ard, it had a climate altogether more severe; and it was the testing of the possibility of carrying stock through the winter upon its hills which made, to those who attempted it, a principal anxiety in opening it up.

It consisted of a great block of hill, or mountain, nearly twenty miles in length, cut in two by a rugged break or pass, and three or four thousand feet above the level of the sea.

The climate of the run fairly represented a third step in that of the country; and on my first visit, – a few months after the run had been stocked, – we got a hint of what that same climate could be, if it liked, as we rode up into the pass. We had ridden since sunrise nearly sixty miles; and the country being rough and broken, we had been much delayed, and the last five or six miles were made after sundown. These five miles lay through a long, narrow pass blocked in on both sides by steep, black hills,

and down through which there ran a rapid river, low then, but at times impassable from flood.

The route lay along the banks, where they were available, but the closing-in of the hills, and the twisting of the river-bed, compelled the crossing of the river sixteen times in going either up or down the pass.

The hint the climate gave us was this: – As, with the sun gone down, and the black, cold shadow of the hills making an early nightfall, we crossed and re-crossed, the treading of the horses struck up splashings of water all around, and on dismounting at our journey's end, unmistakable icicles were hanging frozen to the stirrup-irons. Its native name is Opihi, but I always recall it as the "Icicle River," in remembrance.

To say "journey's end," however, may sound grander perhaps than the reality justified: – only two sheep-dogs tethered under a sheep-skin break-wind, and a low hut, – with a small hole covered with calico, for a window, and a rather battered tarpaulin for a roof, – showed that any human beings had broken into the savage solitude of the place. The dogs broke into a burst of barking to which the hills sent back a hollow echo, but not a soul was to be seen at the hut or within range. We silently unsaddled, and let our tired and steaming horses loose, made a fire in the hut (from a small heap of evidently precious fire-wood outside), and finding only bread in a box

which served as a larder, we hung on the everlasting tea-kettle, as the only thing that could be done to forward a possible meal.

Just then, a trampling of sheep and barking of dogs sounded outside, and in the indistinct light we could just make out our old friend C., quite alone, and with difficulty bringing in a small mob of rattling sheep. The wild brutes tried to break away in every direction, and I am afraid poor C. would have stood a small chance of anything more than bread for supper, if we had not been there to help him in forcing them into a small wattle yard near at hand; – this done and our greetings over, one of the sheep was seized and (while C, who had been on the ranges all day, was refitting himself) we killed it by starlight, and shortly reduced it to that phase of sheep commonly known as mutton-chop.

The winding gorge down through which this river of icicles ran was met abruptly, at right angles, by the mouth of a deep pass which cut the ranges above into two frowning blocks; and it was at this grim junction, in a sort of mountain bason, that our little hut stood, looking low and very desolate among the great lowering hills which stood about it.

The lower parts of these hills (as is the case generally with the interior of the southern island) are, for wild country, wonderfully well covered with grasses available for stock, but rugged and rocky towards the ridges, and destitute for scores of miles

of available timber. Life among them, from their distance from the settled districts, and the severity of the climate, was at times weighted with a loneliness and heavy desolation which I believe can only be found in an unpeopled mountain country; and while they are by no means inferior to the old-world mountains in height and grandeur, yet for never-broken silence and utter barrenness of human life, – for wildness, and pure, grand savagism of nature, – they leave the modernised, civilised, hotel-comforted Swiss Alps far, far behind.

Lake Tekapo.

THE great break or rift which formed the nominal southern boundary to this mountain run was named "McKenzie's Pass" after a bush-ranger who, having caught sight of the plains beyond it from the ranges above, tried to push through with a thousand sheep which he had succeeded in carrying off, – like an old Scottish freebooter, – from a station in front. He had one native with him, and had reached in

safety the centre of our run, and camped in the pass. Here, – after a desperate attempt to escape, and yielding only to full-cocked revolvers, – he was overtaken and captured by an overseer who had followed on his track for two days. When taken, he was placed on horseback with his hands tied behind him, and driven to Christchurch, – one hundred and fifty miles, – in front of his captor and a native shepherd, with loaded pistols at their saddle-bows.

Beyond this pass, a great, cold plain stretched away up to the heart of the Southern Alps; the dark bases of Mount Cook, – his top nearly fourteen thousand feet high, – spreading down to meet it. Three great lakes, basoned by mountains, and thirty, forty, and seventy miles in length, receive and filter into a deep blue the glacier water of the ranges, – and the rivers Tekapo, Ohoo, and Pukaki stream out of the lake-mouths, or pour away from the foot of the glaciers, just as (the picture differing only in its utterly lifeless solitude) the heads of great rivers boil up from under ice-caverns in the Swiss valleys, or the full-formed crystal-green Rhone glides out of the Leman Lake under the many-arched bridges of Geneva.

If any restless, ennuyed English traveller, – wearied with the modernised, tourist-covered Chamounix, Zermatt, or Interlaken, and the road-cut, hotel-studded, Swiss and Italian passes, – wishes for new earth, new oxygen, and a new sensation, let him

take his portmanteau, and a berth on board a Southampton mail steamer. In forty-nine days, with little more than three weeks at a time at sea, he will find himself in New Zealand, – and once there, if he will but push up into the interior, I will promise him new and rich experiences to his fill. He shall get back into a lifeless, soundless desert of hills, – he shall climb to unnamed mountain-tops, – he shall cross untrodden, virgin glaciers, seamed with green crevasses, – he shall see avalanches puff out their white clouds from snow-slopes which no one but himself has seen, – and all this he shall see and do, without the presence of a single human sign or soul to break the ghastly solitude about him. Nor, as he revels in this luxury of savagism, – gone from European mountains, – need he lose what I believe is an essential element to the pure enjoyment of the whole, – the exquisite sensation of dearly risking his own life and neck in doing it.

At the head of one of the lakes I have spoken of, – Tekapo by name, – a Scotchman had taken up some high country for sheep, and, – used to rough work in the Highlands, – was quite content with the short fine summers, and bracing, but hard and wild winters of the place. He had nothing but untrodden ranges behind him, and his very house looked low and pressed down by the silent solitude about it. His small garden was bounded by the lake, and for days little blue furrows of water would ripple quietly

against the pebbles; but at times, lashed into storm by westerly gales, waves, which would have been called great by the sea-shore, broke and foamed upon the banks.

Not a stone's throw from the water's edge, he and his wife and one shepherd lived, quite alone, – their house a perfect picture of cleanliness and thrift. A stranger rarely or never passed to tell them of the world; and it was said that every morning, as he passed by from milking his few hardy cows, the old Highlander would salute his wife through the open window with this unvarying welcome: "Good morning, Mrs. Hay," – and she would answer as simply: "Good morning, Mr. Hay," – and that quiet greeting made up to these hardy Highland colonists for all the morning calls, and evening balls, and kettle-drums, and dinner-parties of this more civilised, – but perhaps not more satisfied, – modern English time. His was indeed a life simple even to primitiveness, and I only mention him to show with what little possession some lives are content.

Fire against Fire.

THE old Scotchman, however, was a good friend in need, – as he proved. We had had for the summer of i860, a bright season of continued drought; and though there was still feed for the stock, the whole face of the country was dried and parched. We had seen the air for days thickened with the loom of distant fires, and waited anxiously, hardly hoping ourselves to escape.

At length one morning, on coming outside the hut, a thick wavering wall of smoke, which darkened the sunrise in the valley, rose above the ridges on the eastward side of the pass. We were partially separated from it by a river whose source lay at the head of the pass, and by another stream which rose at some distance, and flowed down another water-shed; but for a space of two miles in front of the hut, lay an open line of thick growth, as a train by which to fire our country over its whole length.

A little before noon the first red gleams broke over the hill-tops above us, and by sun-down the whole line of flames had followed their fiery vanguards across the ridge. Nearer it drew, and nearer, all that day, and the night which followed, –

a red wavering line of fire, shut in above by a thick canopy of black-red smoke which drove by overhead, and through which only at times, for a moment, we caught sight of the cold stars above it.

Our run was covered with scattered sheep which it was impossible to move by weeks of mustering; and seeing the advance of the fire inevitable, about the middle of the afternoon, getting well out into the centre of the valley, – aided by our Highland friend (who happened to be with us), two shepherds, and a bullock-driver, seven in all, – we attempted a last and rather dangerous resource. We started from the bank of the first river, and advancing across the unprotected plain towards the other river I have named, we began to draw, piece by piece, a line of fire through the thick, dry growth, – beating it out with green palm-tree heads, as soon as it had burnt for itself a width of twenty or thirty feet; by this means we hoped to stretch a belt of burnt ground from water to water, so as to be able, at this point, to check and beat back the line of fire coming so inevitably down upon the run; the danger of the attempt lying in the risk of our own fire getting beyond our control among the jungle, and spreading, in spite of us, over the run we were trying to protect.

One of the party cautiously and slowly lit the line, the others, – as soon as a safe breadth was burnt, – beating down the blazing growth with their tree-heads dipped in water. It was smothering and

exhausting work; the heat of the fire was great, the smoke filling the throat and blinding the eyes with soot; – but we kept at it all night, the old Scotch mountaineer working, like Vulcan and Hercules both put together, in the front.

It was a close and desperate race which should touch the further river first, – our burnt belt, or the unchecked, coming flames. Before daybreak, about three o'clock, they were so close upon us that the valley was half lit up as if by smoking torchlight, and we could hear, along a glaring belt of nearly four miles, the continuous roar and rattle of the fire.

At six o'clock, as the autumn morning was breaking over the sky, the struggle drew to its climax: the old Scotchman threshed away along our burning line, like a steam-power Highlander; – the fire was close at hand, and volumes of lurid smoke rolled up against us, heralding the flames; – the river-bank we were striving for was not far off, – but at length, spite of almost frantic efforts, the flames raced across the unfinished track, and, for two hundred yards, got fiery hold of the plain beyond; but below this point the river bent towards us with a sudden turn, and a chance was still left of beating them back to the bank. The Scotchman leading, we followed on, each after each, striking at the hot blaze three or four strokes, then falling back for another instantly to take his place, – and so, after

twenty minutes' scorching work, the hungry fire was driven back till the goal was gained, – the brink of the safeguard river, – where stone-broken ripples of running water lapped out the last of the conquered flames.

One hand was despatched to the hut for bread and meat, and all hands patrolled to and fro for four hours after this; and it was full noon of a new day when, after twenty-four hours of very exhausting work, we saw the fire sweep away up the further sides of the range, and leave our unconscious sheep safe on the still grassed facings of their run.

Ghosts of Legs of Mutton.

Late in the autumn of our second year on this mountain-pass run, we happened to be five in party at the hut; to these five were added two shepherds and a stockman from one station, and two shepherds from another, – come over from front runs to attend a general muster of our sheep and cattle. We were hard pushed for space; but there was room, –

counting the floor, – for ten to lie down, on sheepskins.

A cold, threatening wind was sweeping up the pass; the sun was down, and we considered the day over. All at once, a general chorus of eight dogs, tethered behind a breakwind, announced something unusual approaching. Stooping through the hut door, and looking down the pass, to our surprise and no little dismay, we made out three drays wending their way over the last crossing of the river, having with them a party of fifteen people, including two children, and a Scotch servant girl, – the first woman I had ever seen in those regions. Arrived at the back of our hut, they halted, – unyoked their bullocks, – said they were out of meat, and would be glad of a sheep or two in the morning, – and finally informed us that they were "going to stay with us for the night."

Now it's all very well for fifteen people, who are out of meat, to come and say they're "going to stay with you for the night" – but when, having previously only room for five, you have already ten guests under your hut roof, the addition of fifteen doesn't in any way simplify arrangements, and in fact the whole thing assumes the proportions of a most stupendous bore.

However, the position was inevitable, and had to be met at once. We cleared out a sort of small, low shed, or rubbish-den, – which had the earth for

a floor, – and told-off fifteen men to sleep in it as best they could. We cut off a narrow slice of our hut by hanging a dray-cloth across it, consigning it at night to the Scotch servant and the two children; and while doing so, learnt that the party were pushing back to occupy a piece of new country behind us, and proposed to proceed on the following morning. We had but little meat in the hut, and in ten minutes after our supper began, twenty-five hungry mouths devoured every atom of it.

Night closed down, darkened by snowy-looking clouds. We retired, – sleeping in rows on the ground, – the fifteen fellows in the shed packed like sardines, one against each other.

While they are asleep, I will just mention that five-and-twenty suspicious sheep, from a scabby flock, had lately joined ours, and in order to ascertain whether they really were infected (so as to make the owner legally responsible) we had kept them for six weeks in a hurdle-pen, fed with what little wild grass we could collect. At the end of this time, though nothing definite appeared, we thought it best (after correspondence with the owner) to kill them, to prevent risk; and this C. and I had done about a fortnight before, burying the bodies, and merely cutting off the legs and shoulders, which were thin and withered, and impaling them in rows on pointed stakes, as food for the sheep-dogs.

This being so, we will return to the five-and-twenty

two-legged sardines whom we left sleeping on the hut floors.

The night had been cold, and a suspicious, deep silence, of which we knew the meaning well, had reigned outside the hut. We slept in our clothes, so didn't take long dressing, and old C., who was always anxious about the sheep, and as restless as a watch-dog, was the first astir. Kicking one or two of the sleeping sardines and making them groan, I crawled through the hut door after him.

The view outside was this: – The grey morning was just breaking, and hill and valley, gorge and pass were white with deep snow, and the whole air thick, and mottled with big, whirling flakes falling rapidly from a leaden sky.

The position inside was this: – Five-and-twenty people in a hut; – no meat; – and no getting away till the snow stopped and cleared.

Gradually the snoring sardines, one after the other, bundled up from the floor, and their cheerful prospects stared them also in the face. C. and I got outside and stood in the snow, on the lee side of the hut, to confer apart. We were obliged to give up the muster, and many branch disorganisations arose out of this. But the imminent question, – how to feed five-and-twenty people, with no meat to feed them on, and the sheep inaccessible for days, – was pressing.

C. looked at me, – and I at him. We each guessed

what the other thought; – our eyes met; – we didn't say anything, but we gave a mutual nod.

C. got a big iron crock in which we boiled our daily meat; and I fetched five of the shrivelled legs and shoulders, so thin and withered that it was impossible to tell which was which, – C. insisting on calling them, in a promiscuous and rather ghastly way, "arms and legs" Some things were boiled in that crock which served the wretched party for breakfast; and twice again the same day the operation was repeated.

More snow fell at night, – and the next morning two feet in depth lay against the hut door, dark snow clouds hung overhead, and an icy wind drifted up the pass. Still, the party had to be fed; and that day the row of ghastly legs and shoulders lessened again by twenty; – five went to the dogs, and fifteen, – Well the party had meat three times a day, and there was no other meat that I know of.

The third day no snow fell; but till it had somewhat thawed down, it was impossible for anyone to move, as the face of the country was hidden by deep drift, and hollows and swamps were invisible.

The misery of the whole affair was unmitigated. The poor children, who lived principally on heavy bread and "lillippee," (a mixture nothing more nor less than paper-hanging paste) cried at intervals, without apparent cause, merely bewailing the general wretchedness of the whole. They were very cold, –

and so were we all. The fifteen unhappy sardines in the shed took it by turns to come in to the hut fire and warm themselves, feeling infinitely colder afterwards.

In the morning, – our flour being heavily walked into, and the impaled legs and shoulders having become, to say the least of it, so extremely second-rate that it seemed impossible to proceed with them, – I called C. aside, and said: "C., under the circumstances, what do you think had better be done?"

C. looked solemnly down upon the ground, or rather upon the snow, and replied with the carnivorous voice of a confirmed cannibal:

"Boil some more arms and legs."

And fifteen more of these ghastly relics were boiled and eaten accordingly.

But things had come to their worst, and began to mend. That afternoon there came over the western hills a single puff of the warm autumn wind, peculiar to the island, which melts the snow with great rapidity, and whose friendly coming I have recorded more than once in these notes. It increased by sundown, and all night roared away around the hut, – a perfect hurricane, – the snow running in streams through our roof, and soaking the poor sardines in the shed.

The next day the party broke up, and we were able to get at our sheep, but I do not think that one

of the travellers who had "come to stay with us for the night" ever knew what they had lived upon during their visit.

I can only say that, for their own sakes, I sincerely trust they never will.

We do not save our Bacon.

ABOUT a hundred and twenty years ago, old Captain Cook, in the heavy-timber'd and round bow'd ship of the time, cautiously steered his way round two new countries in the South Pacific, – countries fully as large as England and Ireland. All the coast-line lay open to his ship's bows: silent beaches stretched out in the sun for scores of miles, and never a bathing-machine, – headlands pushed out into the sea, and bore no tower and no lighthouse, – and bays ran into the land, fringed only with rows of tree-trunks, ridges of weedy rock, or little harbours of shining sand. High mountains, a long way off, lifted up peaks in the autumn sun, – blue waves rolled on to the shore, apparently quite at home, as

if they knew the strange place well, – new birds steered by the mast-head, and stared with their full eyes at that new thing, the ship, – sea-gulls of the Antipodes (blue-grey), and cape-hens, and greater sea-birds, unknown, crossed and re-crossed behind the stern, with slow and even passage; and at more rare times, the land-bird, – never seen before by the crew of the old-world ship, – hurried quickly by with uneven flight, uncertain whether to pitch upon the yard-arms, or flutter back to the forest of trees from which she came.

Old Cook paced his deck, – worn by the steppings of a year, – and brought his heavy-ringed telescope to bear upon the coast. He has come twenty thousand miles, and has to get back again, – he is not only responsible for his own re-delivery to the circle of his household, but for the home-return also of sixty rough but good men who have hearths as well as he.

'Tis'nt an easy thing to push a big ship into safe waters, where bars, and shoals, and reefs have never been charted, and are invisible and unknown. Notwithstanding, the old order, still given, is heard on the deck of the "Endeavour," – "Mainsail haul" – and the bows of the ship come round, and she takes a clean turning in her course, and leaving no mark in the waters which had never washed an English ship before, heads away towards a dark opening in the bluff hills which beat back the waves upon her starboard bow.

[Pages 151-180]

As the bows of the ship part for a moment the new and clear blue waters, a dark gap in the coastline ahead of the bowsprit widens and widens, as if of itself opening shelter for the wandering ship.

On the port bow, broken water, with here and there a white breaker frothing up, warns the ship away; but on the starboard side, deep black-green waters, almost still, under the shelter of straight walls of rock, show her where her keel may sweep safely by into shelter.

While the quarter-master stiffly holds the spokes of the wheel, keeping his eye only on three things, – the yards, the binnacle, and the skipper, – the hard-handed crew, hauling at the well-known ropes, clew up the top-gallant sails, furl the jibs, stow the mizen, and then laying aloft, with springing steps up the shrouds, stow the loose sails taut, and at last, – as the ship drifts, with less and less speed, by new inlets, and never-seen silent bays, – take in the last of the scarcely-lifted canvas, – the cable runs with a hoarse rattle over the hawsers, – the anchor grips, – and the round bows that have plunged over so many waves are slowly and steadily pulled round to their halting-place, and the ship stays where she has never rested before, and will never come to a halt again.

Her anchor has fastened in tough earth which holds on to the world, though it is foot to foot with old England, – and the harbours and hills are the hills and harbours of New Zealand.

Now old Cook was fourteen thousand miles from home, and had sixty men, and his ship, and himself to steer back safe to his and their old country. He had none of the helps which later times give to those who go down to the sea in ships: he had nothing to fall back on if the water in his casks failed, – no condenser which would give him five hundred fresh gallons per day to drink, – no tons of almost fresh meats stowed in his hold, – no acids, nor extracts, nor patent substitutes for good things packed away in the after-hold. In those rough days none of these things were; but Captain, and mate, and sailor had to fare as he might; his only larder being the salt-beef cask, and the biscuit bag, with which the old crews of 1700 were stored and fed.

He had in his jolly boat, on the main deck, a few precious sheep, – to him and his men beyond price, because they could not be bought again, – and in the fo'castle a small store of live four-footed provender, capable of being reduced to the form of pork chop, which, as he toiled home over the waste of two seas, would give him and his men still a fresh meal to stand between them and scurvy, their perpetual foe.

Yet old Cook, from his precious stock, spared sheep enough, and hogs enough to plenish the island with what it had sorely lacked for centuries, – for, except a few birds, rats, fish, and half-putrid whale, the natives had had little besides berries and

fern-root to starve upon, – not a single quadruped, besides the rat, existing in the islands.

Although I am going to close this note with a comic ending, I cannot help saying that I believe old Cook will, for this good gift, reap his reward; for at so critical a time he gave not grudgingly, or of necessity, from his scanty store, but with a liberal hand and as a cheerful giver.

The jolly-boat was rowed ashore through the new blue water to the new beach, and the wondering four-footed freight were let loose upon the silent island. After what was to them a century of prison in a tarry jolly-boat, the four-legged discharged prisoners, on finding their feet on real earth again, with fern and grass about their knees and under their noses, could at first only half believe in their liberty; but at length, practically and metaphorically kicking up their heels, they took-off up the new hillsides, where were no bars, and no gates, and no masters, nor anything which, in the most distant way, hinted at the butcher or the butcher's knife.

But for the sheep there were only a few quiet campings at sunset, and a few dewy mornings to come. The New Zealander of the period, – a thoroughbred and complete savage, sufficiently starving to sit down with pleasure to a cold joint of his own uncle, – caught sight of the undreamed-of luxury of what appeared to him to be a rat as big as a table. Out came his green-stone knife, a car-

nivorous grin spread about his set teeth, and a stealthy advance, ending in a dozen rapid leaps, placed a quiet ewe in his grip. Ewe's career terminated in three seconds. The sheep were all killed.

The pigs escaped in the dense underbush, and got away into the interior.

It is curious how small matters which happen in one century produce definite consequences in the next: – the escape of those pigs into the jungle, in 1742, was the seed of many thousands of consequences, one of the latest of which enables me, in 1874, to supply the reader with the next illustration.

Those few last-century pigs spread in vast numbers over the whole of the Islands. In the south they lived chiefly on the fat and juicy root of the New Zealand fern, to obtain which they up-rooted the surface of the country, over thousands of acres, as if it had been broken up by steam-ploughs. On the warmer slopes at Burke's Pass there were many active and thriving communities, – the sows savage in defence of their litters, and the boars fierce and powerful.

I remember going out once with B. and C., and after a hard day's work succeeding in killing some five-and-twenty or thirty head. After collecting together, as well as we could, at two spots, fourteen of the best of the scattered carcases, we wended our way in the twilight over the eight or

ten miles of hills between us and our hut, – horses, and dogs, and selves pretty fairly done up.

Next day we yoked up two of our bullock-team, and hooking them on to a rough sledge, started early to call at our two depots of fresh pork. We reached the furthest in about a couple of hours, our route passing over steep, rolling spurs of hill without a trace of roadway, and so broken and, in some places, akin to the precipitous, as to be certainly quite impassable by anything on wheels. After picking up our fourteen pigs, – and with the assistance of a couple of dray-ropes piling them on the sledge as securely as dead pigs may be piled, – we started for home over the tumbled country I have described.

We had got about half way, when we arrived at a very steep siding, having at its foot a deep perpendicular chasm, almost close to the edge of which the steep slope of the hill compelled us to pass. The empty sledge, free of impedimenta, had come by in the morning safely enough, but fourteen dead pigs were too much for its centre of gravity. Just as we came to the worst pinch of the whole, the porkers'-omnibus gave an unsteady roll or two, and at last, as the ropes slackened and loosened in the strain, turned, with a heavy lurch, completely topsyturvy, and launched every pig, and all our hopes of bacon sheer over the edge. There was a rattle of the yokes and bullock-chain as the sledge tried to follow, and a heavy thud came up from the chasm

as its burden landed on the boulder-stones below, – but the empty sledge was all that remained behind, and we and our pigs had parted company for good.

The sides of the rift were too sheer to allow, for a moment, any idea of our recovering our spilt spoil; so with two lost days, and fourteen lost pigs behind us, and an empty sledge beside us, we returned without a funeral note, – but not without a considerable sprinkling of stiff expressions, – to the empty larder and carefully prepared pickle-tub which we had left at our hut in the morning.

Chance did not take us into that part of the run for nearly three years, and as we at length passed the spot again, on a bright summer morning, there lay our prime pigs, – a heap of loose bones, whitening in the sun.

Look Out!

ALTHOUGH the very respectable pigs named in the last note were, when we left them, very decidedly done with, I have not yet quite done with the pigs; – in fact they number much too large a constituency to be hastily dismissed by anyone in the least degree assuming to be their spokesman or biographer.

Among the innumerable and entangled ranges of rich hill-country towards the North of our Island, they lived and moved in communities whose ungetoverable numbers would take a pretty stiff census to record. It may be thought that their ranks might have been profitably marshalled, via the boar-spear, into the pickle-cask; but so large a proportion of them were tough and wiry, and owners of "a lean and hungry look," that, for larder-loot, they were little worth the toil of running them down. Nevertheless, to run them down was, to the sheep-owner of the day, (burdened with many other cares,) still one more imperative necessity. For, in many cases, they spread over his run in uncountable droves, ploughed-up the slopes of his sunny hill-sides till the whole for miles was honey-combed with water-pits, and the boldest and most famished of their

hungry legions would follow hard upon the skirts of the flocks when the ewes were bringing their new young sheep into the world, and would fiercely champ up the hardly born offspring, while the brave old ewe made fruitless rushes at the regardless murderer.

As the numbers of the flocks increased, and were compelled to spread further and further away from the immediate watch of the shepherds, it became every day more urgent upon the squatter to wage war, without quarter, upon these carniverous hordes. A plan was adopted of offering a price per pig for their destruction, and the tally of the slain was taken not per head but per tail. A party of three to five mates would contract with the station-owner or overseer to kill off the wild pigs upon any given run, at a price per tail. The price varied from sixpence to tenpence, and generally stood at about ninepence, for every more or less curly trophy brought in.

The party would start, – with two or more rough dogs, and a tough pack-horse bearing their provisions, tent, and swags, – and get back upon the further slopes of the ranges whither, by this time, the settlers' advance had forced their intended game to beat retreat. After laying in store a day-break meal, (which the reader may or may not classify as breakfast) they would cram into the pockets of their monkey-jackets enough damper and cold mutton to last them for the day, – strap to their waists, each,

a hilted knife, excellently adapted for murdering, – light their pipes, – whistle their dogs, – and start an indiscriminate butcher's business for the day.

Where the pigs were thick, not many minutes would pass before snorts would be heard among the flax or snow-grass, and black backs be seen, here and there, heaving up above the jungle like the fins of porpoise at sea. In a second, the dogs would spring forward, and after a sharp course, – perhaps of a quarter of a mile at outside, – two or more porkers would have two rows of dog's teeth (with forty pounds of dog attached) clenched tight to their ears.

Now at no time is a pig too closely allied to a race-horse; but, handicapped with nearly half a hundred-weight of dog, his capacities for fleetness are pretty well extinguished. In less than two minutes after he is collared, our friends, the tail-contractors, are upon him, and – his tale is told. Out comes the knife aforesaid, (so strongly recommended in cases of "pigicide") its owner grabs, with one hand, the hind leg of the shrieking prey, and, with the other, plunges the blade once, and twice, through the vulnerable point behind the shoulder, deep into the heart.

Pig gives up for good; – poor chap! – he meant no harm, but has to die that his hunters may occupy and replenish the earth.

And this first picture is simply a photograph of

what takes place that day, a hundred times, before the sun has left his good-bye lights upon the western ranges.

To an English ear, the huge numbers in which these descendants of old Cook's last century bounty were at this time slaughtered may appear to verge upon the Munchausen; but it is nevertheless quite true that vast numbers were killed at various points of the settlement, – upon one large run ten thousand pigs having been butchered, with scarcely any perceivable decrease in their number.

Though these vast droves established their colonies chiefly at the northern end of the province, yet lesser communities spread far down the island to the south, and – a couple of hundred miles from the centres of population – cropped up in small but active associations, in the neighbourhood of country which was awarded us upon the Opawa.

Not many days had we, among the emergencies of first occupation of mountain country, for what was (by comparison) a sport and relaxation; but here and there we did find a few days, or half days, which might be given to what was not altogether labor or anxiety. Now and then we found that things did allow us to girth our saddles on to our horses, and ride out among the spurs of the ranges, with no very pressing object beyond the possible ultimate attainment of a roast leg of wild pork.

Very well I remember one of these rather sparse

times. I see the old day, – a fair sun, – and green slopes, – and high ridges above, – and square miles of silent country with never a foot to tread upon it, – and a small hut, little higher than the men who are saddling their horses by the door.

As we started, the sun had risen well over the high peaks which bordered us all round. As far as anyone could see, we were the only objects, beside the stunted palms, which showed above the rough growth of the hills. We were on the look-out for lost cattle, and had hardly made the acquirement of wild pig our chiefest object. It took us some two hours before we got upon country where it was possible, – even if necessary, – to attempt anything like speed, and though my artist has hardly crammed us among the ranges as closely as he should have done, yet it was just about this point that we sighted a mob of cattle which we at once attempted to head at a smart gallop.

We had followed them at a hard canter for about a mile, when there suddenly broke out from behind a clump of ti-palms, almost under our horses' fore-feet, a rushing mob of pigs, giving vent to a volley of grunting and squealing of a most unmitigated and frantic character. There were big boars, a fierce sow or two, and a strong body of nearly full-grown porkers. The biggest of the boars, scorning the remotest idea of retreat, planted himself in a second at bay in front of C. and his horse. C., who was always good at

need, pitched himself back in his saddle, and hauled hard on to his horse's jaws.

A fierce old sow had meanwhile sprung up close under the feet of a rather rash mare which B. was riding. B. had a facility for getting into difficulties. In a second his horse had given a snort, a plunge, and a right-angle swerve, the joint effect of which sent B. at a peculiar angle from the saddle, and landed him, – with no horse under him, – kelumpus on the ground. For a moment or two, notwithstanding this uninvited shock, he did his best to protest against any closer advances on the part of the sow aforesaid, but it is not quite clear what would have eventually occurred if the writer, and C., (who by this time had sufficiently settled matters with the double-tusked intruder who had pulled him up on the King's highway, to look round and behind him,) had not sighted his rather precarious position, and rattled up to his assistance.

He was some few hundred yards from us, and by the time we got up, having fallen partly on the back of his head, was completely insensible. For nearly twenty minutes we were quite unable to bring him back to himself. I got gravely anxious, for he happened to be my brother, and having worked alongside me for many years, I reckoned him at a value which made me consider the remotest idea of his loss as the profoundest possible misfortune.

It is curious how comedy, in life, may border upon

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LOOK OUT!

the very edge of the most profound tragedy. I assure the reader that for twenty minutes I thought my brother's life was lost, – and I felt sick beyond speaking as I thought so, – and yet within two hours, C. and I shook with laughing as we remembered all that had passed. But before this phase came we had had a grave time of it.

After lying on the ground perfectly motionless, and scarcely breathing, for the better part of half an hour, B. made the slightest possible movement. His last proceeding, before finally collapsing into the insensible, was to wave an old red cotton pocket-handkerchief in the air, above the rank grass in which he lay, by way of signal as to where he was, – and the first sign he gave of not being altogether past hoping for was an attempt to give a feeble signal with the same old cotton appliance.

We certainly, meanwhile, had been partaking of rather more, – if anything, – than our usual quota of air, but upon the sight of this symptom, it is necessary that I record that "we breathed again." B. "breathed again" too, rather more strongly than before, and we raised him a little, and re-arranged him in a rather less complicated bundle than that into which he had hitherto persisted in collapsing.

In about three parts of an hour, he was sufficiently restored to the possession of his powerful intellectual faculties to look at me with a stolid countenance, and observe in a weak, but rather didactic voice: – "We came down here last Wednesday."

[N.B. We had all been located on the run for the past three months! – but C. and I cordially concurred in his view of our more recent arrival.]

He then enquired, with an exactly similar expression of countenance, but in a low and rather cautious tone: – "Did we buy this run?"

[We had ourselves secured it, without purchase, after many months of exploring.]

At this stage B. was hoisted on to the quietest of our horses, and led cautiously over the five or six miles of rolling downs between us and home. C. stuck to him on the off side, but he sat his horse particularly like a bag of potatoes, and dismounted at last, in sorry form, at the hut door.

Three days later, however, he resumed a certain wonted obstinacy, – an excellent sign, – and in a week was the far-seeing, obstinate, short-sighted, invaluable, original old B. again.

With the exception of a wife, he has met with no severe accident since.

Old French.

A GOOD and trusty servant, who was with us in the early days on this Pass Run, was a Devonshire man, – "French" by name, – from Manaton, N. Devon; and, for his position in life, a most extraordinary person. No matter what we talked of, he was entirely at home on the point, – English history, or French, or Grecian, or Roman, – he knew them all; and would correct us (in broad Devonshire,) to our unspeakable surprise, in old German chronicles, and talk of Stanislaus and his battles and misfortunes in Poland a hundred years ago, with the most annihilating accuracy. He was a good old man too, withal, and every evening would regularly take down an old Bible from a hole in the grass roof, and steadily read a chapter to himself. His forehead was bald and heavily wrinkled, and he wore a close beard, – and, as he sat opposite to me in the winter fire-light, he looked so exactly like pictures one has seen of St. Peter in his fisherman's days, that one quite forgot the low hut, and the great mountains above it, and verily realised for a moment the old times which lived and passed eighteen hundred winters ago.

The old man is comfortably quartered now at the

coast town of Timaru; and if ever I meet him again, I shall shake his hard hand with all respect, remembering his four years of faithful service among those hills.

Another very useful hand we had was a bullock-driver; and I mention him as one of a class, – men who, in the course of a hard life, do themselves but little good, but who render essential service during the really savage chances that befall in pushing back into fresh country. The man was called "Jack." He had another name, but I never could very distinctly make it out. It was rather difficult to say where he had come from, – or rather where he had not come from; – for he talked (without bragging) of all odd corners of the world. He had tried shepherding and gold-digging in Australia, – had been engaged in some mysterious occupation, which he kept dark, on what he called the "Plate River" – had been in the Indian Army during the Sepoy mutiny, – and was now driving wool-drays in New Zealand.

And crooked and wild work he had of it at times. The starting-point of his dray-journeys was from our hut in Burke's Pass. With a load each way it was a fortnight's work to go to the coast and return, travelling all the time over broken country, with no road, and twenty river-crossings; – and the dray-wheels at night for shelter. Eight or ten bullocks, – wild brutes enough at times, – made up

his team: and he took a led horse behind the dray for hunting them up in the morning. At night they sometimes strayed for miles, and it was often necessary to chain them in their yokes, as they stood, to the locked dray-wheels. Even then, they often broke away, – their restless tugging and dragging at the heavy chains by no means soothing poor Jack's slumber under the wheels.

Once or twice a year, he went the through-journey to Christchurch, – or to town, as it was more emphatically called, – and, like hundreds of his class, he went down with the set resolution "to have a burst." This process he commenced by hiring at the first up-country way-side inn, a day or two from town, a man to drive his dray for the rest of the route; and then got altogether intoxicated, and was taken down to town on the top of the wool-bales on his dray. While there he would spend every farthing of his year's wages, and meet us, to take the dray up country again, as poor as he was ten years before. Yet the man had good points many: he was honest as the day, – never forgot his respect to us, – and had a zeal and primitive pride in overcoming the hard chances of his hard life.

I do not know where old Jack is now, but I am afraid that he has not won, like my old North Devon friend, a cottage-roof of his own as a shelter when rough life and hard times have made his working days heavy.

Lost in the Opihi.

A few months after the affair of the departed sheeps' legs and arms, we were travelling down the gorge, along the route of the Opihi – that treacherous river. It was dangerously flooded, and had broken heavily against our saddle-bows in fording. On the road we overtook one of our bullock-drays taking wool to the coast: the driver had taken down behind the dray a strong and very trustworthy stock-horse, specially good at a river, to be exchanged (as a relay in our ride of a hundred and sixty miles) for one of ours. He was a fine powerful chesnut, docile as a lamb, but full of endurance, and in the water courageous as a lion. We calculated he had journeyed for us at least ten thousand miles, and lest this distance should startle the reader, I would remind him that it is only fifty miles a week for four years, and we had him, (the horse, not the reader,) in full work for nearly six.

On coming up to the dray, the horse was not to be seen, and the driver, with his face full of dismay, told us how this came to be.

He had crossed the river twice that morning, with great difficulty, with the dray and team; but towards

evening, – the river rising fast all day, – at the third crossing, full in the middle of the river, the current had washed the bullocks off their legs, and twisted them down into deep water. Here they struggled for some minutes till, thinking their escape with the dray hopeless, the driver had succeeded in freeing an axe which was always carried lashed to the guard-irons, with the intention of cutting the dray-pole, and so letting the team escape out. At the same time he saw, without being able to get at him, that the horse was struggling violently, with his head under the dray. The driver had already begun to cut the pole, (as well as he could through the water,) when the leading pair of the eight bullocks got a footing in front, and with a desperate effort dragged the rest of the team down, so that they also could touch the ground; and though driven close to the edge of the rapid below, they succeeded in taking the load to shore. But as they came streaming up the steep bank, a heavy weight hung on the rear of the dray, and the poor old horse, who had taken us hundreds of times over high rivers, was dragged heavily out of the flood, – rewarded, after all his years of faithful service, by being drowned in the Opihi at last.

He was lying dead on the bank, not far from the dray; we cut the girths to clear the saddle, but the bit was tight in his clenched teeth, and we could not free it; so we would not cut open his lips to

loose it, but we looked at him and thought of the years of work we had had together, – of long days' journeys, and cold night-campings, and river-crossings without number which the faithful old fellow had done with us, – and we lifted his cold fore-foot in farewell, and left him there, and rode away, sorrowfully remembering him as a tried old friend who could stand by us no more.

Nearly at the same point as that at which the old horse was lost, another accident occurred which I mention because very little new country is opened up without similar misfortunes befalling the first settlers.

After a heavy spring flood, we started, as soon as the gorge appeared at all safe, to get down through the sixty miles of hill which lay coastwards of the run. About five and thirty miles from our hut, at one of the most dangerous crossings of the river, – increased now by swollen branches which had joined it on all sides, – a man was camped who was going to put up a hut as a sort of way-side shelter. He told us that that morning a single horseman had ridden up, leading a second horse, shivering and stiffened, without a bridle, and without a rider. He had caught the horse on an island in the river-bed, and had left him tethered at the camp. We recognised the horse at once as belonging to a respectable hand who had been shearing for us, and who had

gone down the pass the evening before. Our route followed the river for ten miles further, and we searched the whole way, – crossing in three places with great difficulty, – without finding a trace of the lost rider. A week later his body was found three miles from where the horse was caught, upon a shingle spit, within a few yards of which we had passed without finding it. The poor fellow had attempted to ford while the river was heavily flooded, but had been washed off his horse, and clinging to the bridle the reins had snapped, and the horse had stemmed his way out alone; but the rider, – without a soul for miles to see or help him, – had been instantly washed under, and drowned by the cold flooded waters of the Opihi. I do not think the mare he was riding was to blame, for we bought her, and rode her afterwards for some years, and she was always fairly steady and staunch in the water.

The route, at one point of which this accident fell out, (and over which old Jack laboriously drayed his load,) is now surrounded by occupied sheep-country, and a made road has been formed at all difficult points. The three most dangerous crossings of the river are altogether avoided, and the rest halved in number by cuttings and embankments; and two days will now take a dray through, where a long week was occupied before.

Letting 'em have it.

IT'S all very well to talk of being kind to animals, and keeping your temper, and not getting riled, – but I'll back a pair of wild New Zealand or Australian bullocks, against any living thing, to raise a man's fur to the extremest extent of exasperation and stiver.

I've known a dray, with eight or ten bullocks in front, start from a distant station for town, with nearly ten days' journey to get there: – the driver and one other hand (perhaps the owner) with him, having to camp with his restless team, for many more nights than one, on the open plain, without roof or fire-wood, and not a stick of yard or fence, as boundary, for miles.

With a wish to let them pick up a good meal which shall serve for supper after their long day's drag, and for breakfast before to-morrow's journey, the driver, with doubtful mind, would let his team go; unyoking perhaps six out of the ten, and leaving the other four, yoked up in pairs, to feed and lie down in couple, and so lessen the constant tendency to "hook it" which is so leading a feature of the bullock disposition.

As the shadows fall deeper and deeper over the

plains, and the last lights die out on the ranges, the driver watches the last loom of his team with anxious gaze, as they moon about, not very contentedly, within range of the camp.

He's half doubtful about having unyoked any of them, and half wishes he had chained four of the most cantankerous to the locked wheels.

However, there's nothing to do now but to chance it.

The night comes down like a black blanket round the solitary dray: the driver, tired in a way which English sleepers don't know of, creeps under his dray-wheels, – unrolls his blankets on the ground, – rolls himself into them, – and sleep takes him fast prisoner, yet releases him, with full release, from all the long toils and hard labour of the day gone by.

On go the hours, – and the moon does her work, and the winds sweep here and there, and shake the dray-cloth stretched over the dead-tired man, and not a sound comes by, except the rain drives down and hits the tarpaulin like whip-sticks – till out in the East a grey half-circle broadens and broadens, and day is telegraphed as on the road with express and golden signals.

I like to give men their due, and I must say that, after years of experience, I do give scores of the men who had the hard lines of first finding tracks over the roadless New Zealand up-country very complete credit for the way in which they worked through it,

and specially for the way in which they turned out at daybreak.

'Tisn't a very easy thing, – when one sees little or no light between two wheels of a dray, when one lies on the ground so tired that one seems part of it, and when one's nose tells one that the outside air is made up of hoar-frost, – to turn out of a roll of blankets, and creep into one's boots and toggery of yesterday (not seldom icy with frost) and crawl from under the dray-cloth stiff with rime, into a morning without a sun. Yet all this was pluckily done, scores of times, by hard-fisted men I remember.

And good need there was, too, of turning out, even before the sun came. For sheep and cattle don't respect times and seasons, and don't notice the absence of a little more or less of daylight, as their reputed masters do, but think it quite a simple thing (so that there's no boundary to stop them) to take a midnight walk of ten or fifteen miles, if they think its the way home, – or if they want water, – or fancy better feed, – or follow a chum who goes ahead because he is possessed with an idea that three years ago he was a lamb or calf somewhere hereabouts.

No, – a team of half-wild bullocks care no more for the objects, interests, cares and anxieties of a settler than the wooden yoke that couples them. While the tired man, who has let them go from pity,

sleeps out his urgent rest on the ground, they leave him to his own look-out for to-morrow. They walk off anywhere into the night with perfection of ingratitude. Let them but scatter for three miles, and it's a toss-up, dead against the settler, whether he find them before the sun bends once more over the plains: – and if he doesn't find them by the time his solar majesty makes another bow behind the hills, don't you give much coin for the chance of his finding them to-morrow. They can make off in twenty different directions, and if you want to find them you may take nineteen, – and all wrong.

I have known a squatter lose four of his team of eight, and be fourteen days hunting them up, and, after days and nights of weariness and journeying, find them, wilder than ever, abandoned chums in a mob of a hundred head, each one beast seven times wilder than they.

Meanwhile, please take a short walk with me through the troubled corners of the settler's mind.

He has, perhaps, been hindered and delayed in his shearing by drawbacks which he could not better with all his labour, – the autumn is close on him, and he has piles of work to do to garrison himself for the winter, – he fancies the sheep upon his run are only being half shepherded while "the cove" (as he is called) isn't on the ground, – he fears his driver, whom he has left with the dray and the other half of the team, is getting drunk at the nearest accommo-

dation hut or up-country inn, – he can see, by the ominous and lurid blue glare over the mountains, that the rivers in front of him are rising fast, – he knows his partner in town is saying: "What the deuce is that chap about with the wool?" – he can't sleep for thinking what time he is losing, – he is hacked at with a perpetual uncertainty whether he had better go back, or go on, – and his mind is augur'd, and gimleted, and chisel'd with doubt and bother, and his brains, and eyes, and head are sun-worn, and wind-wearied, and done-up.

At last, after days of weary riding and wandering, he does, he is certain, "spot" his cattle in the pale circle of his field-glass. He has looked through it so often that he's almost sick of trying again, but he is at last clear that he has found his game. He puts up his glass, looks to his girths, clears his stockwhip lash, and wakes up his horse with a careful but suggestive spur.

Warily he works up to the mob, endeavouring to assume a nonchalant and undesigning air, as if he were merely out for a short ride, and, as it were, loitering nowhere in particular, – but certainly having no designs on any cattle whatever. All this is done with the anxious hope that the mob won't start till he has had time to insinuate himself between it and his team, who are in a little clump on one edge of it; or at all events so to place himself that he may have a chance, when they do start, of being near enough

to get at his beasts in time to give them such a slashing across the eyes as to baulk them for a moment, and by dint of subsequent and unlimited cutting and slashing (with a stiff seasoning of the stiffest possible expressions) to hold them at bay till the mob has skedaddled in the distance.

Poor chap! Weary, bothered stock-owner! – (reader, please sympathise) – his labors are not at an end, nor his journeyings finished.

Just as, by a skilful approach, he has made very nearly close enough for action, and nervously grasps his stock-whip and tightens his reins, a fierce, wild, staring heifer throws up her head, with a snuff, in the air, – takes one point-blank impudent stare at the squatter, – and makes a short rush round the inner part of the mob. At her challenge every head goes up: – there is only a second's pause, – away goes the mob at a dead gallop, squatter's team rattling in with the rest, throwing up their heels, and waving insulting and exasperating tails in the face of their powerless and admirably infuriated owner.

'Tis enough to make a saint say something stiff: – considerable margin is solicited for the squatter.

It perhaps takes him three days to get those cattle yarded, and his own bullocks drafted, – three days of bother, anxiety, and exasperation, – (and all the while they mayn't have been ten miles from his dray!). He warily steers them as they bolt out of the stock-yard, where perhaps fifty wild head are hauching and

bellowing, and he pilots them with anxious and wrinkled brow over the first few miles of broken country beyond.

At last he gets them on level ground, and on the track which leads straight to the spot where his sore-hindered dray is camped. Then comes his time: – just a small chance to let off his fourteen days' bottled disappointment, and most excellent fury. It is yet early in the day; he knows that if he can get his beasts pretty quickly up to the dray, he can make a stage on the road that day, and perhaps get his belated wool down to town in time to catch a fast ship leaving for England. So, – look out! – he gathers up his reins with a taut fist, plants his feet deep in the stirrups, sticks in his spurs, brings his stock-whip lash high into the air and straight down, – once, – twice, – three times, – a score of times, – over the backs of his team, and lets 'em have it with an ample margin. And nobody can blame him. 'Tis an excellent and choice thrashing, and they deserve every whack of it, – down to the hoofs.

My sympathies are entirely with the squatter.

ONCE when we came up to town from our farthest station, – where I had been bothered out of my life with troublous and exhausting attempts, (extending

[Inserted unpaginated illustration]

LETTING 'EM HAVE IT.

over many weeks,) to muster sheep from grim and impossible ranges, – an uninitiated person, with nevertheless not a bad idea how to write a rhyme or two, handed me one day the following

Ideal of Mountains.

"I often wish that I could sweetly wander
About the airy mountains shining yonder;
They seem so fair and calm, so still and quiet,
So free from dust and shingle, noise and riot,
So all above the fleeting cares of living,
So fair to look upon, so freely giving
To those who tread them happy thoughts and wise, –
Thoughts that expand the heart and wake the eyes
To see and hear what here these gloomy plains
Shall never open to our toiling brains.
Yes, happy mountain, let me dwell by thee,
And wander by thy summits musingly.
Yes, yes; I wish that I could go and stray
Upon those mountains for a summer day,
And climb their mossy tops, and snuff the breeze
Fresh from their waving and leaf-laden trees,
And loiter where the drooping branches mingle
With mountain-waters bubbling o'er the shingle;
I'd listen to the gentle bleating sheep,

And see the woodland robin slyly peep
From out its mossy nest, with round dark eye
All full of wonder as I wandered by:
And as the jewelled sun with gilded crown,
Amid the feathered clouds that floated round,
Left ruby halos as it sank adown,
And yellow-tinted evening paled away
Into the quiet time when night nor day
Can claim the hour as theirs and bid it stay, –
When little quiet chirpings through the air
Are shortly sweetly echoed here and there
From sheltered branch and unseen patchwork nest
Where birds home-come enfold their wings to rest,
As dewy evening softly closed about,
And night stole up, and trembling stars came out, –
There would I rest me by some sheltered mound,
Where mossy cushions spread a couch around,
And evening breezes with their gentle sigh,
And falling waters sang my lullaby.

N.Z., 1863.

[Pages 181-209]

Mountains – Real.

THE foregoing not bad, but delusive, lines are in forcible contrast with the experiences of an expedition, a short and informal account of which I take from a home letter, written at the time, as it gives an idea of the character of the higher mountain ranges of the country. The ascent of the mountain named in the letter was made for the especial purpose of getting a complete bird's-eye view of the country, and of making a rude map, whereby afterwards to steer among the ranges which entangled the country on all sides.

Having proved for nearly three years that the Burke's Pass country (out of which the treacherous Opihi ran) could be safely held during the winter, and that though the snow lay at times two feet thick for a fortnight, yet that the sheep throve and multiplied, – -we started from it to explore still farther back.

I will first say that my friend C., who is named in it, is the C. who (it may be remembered) stood by us so gallantly during the stocking of our first run, and that my friend B. who has made his bow to the reader more than once in these notes, – spite of anything that may be said of him to the contrary, – was a good fellow and an invaluable colonist.

The letter is dated in the autumn (May) 5 of 1861, – and says: –

"Last month C., B., and self started from a rough hut or den in the drear regions of this New Zealand Interior, – a hut which, if you stood half-a-mile off and looked at it, seemed as if some worn-out men, cast on a desert island, had once tried to shelter themselves under it and keep life together near it, – and then left it, – left it there to be blown down, or to rot down, – and had gone away themselves, and been lost on the shelterless mountainsides which looked down upon it.

"Such a hut we left, – and be it remembered that in nothing do I in the least exaggerate or in any wise overdraw the desolation of the picture.

"Three horses bore us and our humble – and to an English judgment, miserable – preparations for an exploration among the ranges westward of the run. I fancy those keen old files, those old horses of ours, (to use the most expressible word I know), clearly twigged the position. "Winder scratch" (colloquialised into "Scratch") "Fitzroy," and "the Grey," knew clearly that they were in for it. No hour's shepherding and back, – no canter to get in bullock-teams, – no stroll to the out-hut, – but a positive, unmistakable expedition, with extra-heavy packs, and bags, and

hobbles, and tin-pots, and tether-ropes, and botherations hanging all over them.

"And all this they distinctly twigged, – trying to take sly side-tracks back to the hut, or to eat grass as if they weren't going anywhere in particular, or to stop altogether as if rain was coming on, and it was no use starting at all.

"However, a little spur-digging and a few stiff expressions induced them to take a different view of things, and a steady start was at length duly effected.

"Ah! how does a day's travel amidst wild country differ, in bitter colonial experience, from the ideal, enjoyable, pic-nic tour of the uninitiated English imagination!

It is thought to be easy, – it is difficult.

It is thought to be exhilarating, – it is exhausting.

It is believed to be picturesque, – it is dangerous.

It is thought to be a healthy relief, – it is in reality an experience of exasperation.

"We had to pass along the foot of an unyielding range of black-sided mountains which, instead of keeping respectably to themselves, as a well-constituted range of mountains ought to do, would keep jutting out here, and jagging out there into the plains below; making spurs, and valleys, and gullies, and gorges, and uncrossable places, without reason and without number. The very out-look which it is perpetually necessary to keep, in order to go anywhere, or make any way at all, wears out the mind and enwrinkles the enwrinkled forehead.

"Of course I cannot expect my horse to leap all the scores of ugly places we meet in the day, while I am lumbering on his back; but when, out of consideration to him, I dismount and, after careful pre-sounding of the sides of a creek, or deep water-course, request him, in symbol, to jump it, – why at the instant when I expect him to take the leap and follow me to the opposite side on which I stand awaiting, – why, I ask, – why does he throw his head stiffly backwards into the air, and demi-drag me, demi-swearing, into the deep-running, uncertain waters between us?

"Why, I ask, does he do this? and why, I ask again, why, as I scramble back, disorganised, from the creek into which he has nearly lugged me, does he leap like a huge vampire into mid-air, and clearing the creek at last, thunder down, about, around, and amongst me and my entanglements, knocking me utterly over, and frightening himself within an ace of idiotcy? Why, I ask, why is this? – but I ask, getting no answer, and expecting none.

"However, I must get up, and get on, and get off, and get by, and get through, and get along amongst under this perpetually continuous and everlastingly riling range of mountains.

"They won't end, do what we will; in fact they keep on beginning; and the ground gets rougher, and the sun gets hotter, and the spear-grass, pointed like steel, gets thicker and ranker, and the hill-spurs get steeper, and the gorges get deeper, and the boulder-stones bigger, and our horses more ob-

streperous and more used-up, and ourselves more disorganised and more ill-tempered: – so, as the sun is dipping down to a bold round hill in front of us, and an evening shade already fills an Indian-ink-coloured valley on its side, we ride but slowly on, proposing to stop at the first respectable camping-ground which chooses to do us the civility of offering itself for the night.

"All at once, B. speaks: – 'I say, pull up, – this '11 do; don't go any further, – pull up.'

"So we even pull up, and get off our horses with a groan, and stand still for a moment before we unsaddle, with sore, tired eyes, and bothered heads, and bodies three days older than when we started ten hours before.

"Then comes slackening of girths, and dragging off of saddles, and unpacking of swags and tether-ropes. C. tethers his horse, – horse and he both groaning. B. tethers his horse, – both groaning. Self tethers self's horse, – both groaning. Two horses roll unreservedly, and with abandon; – t'other horse is above all that kind of thing, and goes on with his grass with an air of contempt.

"A thin fire of a little scrub-thorn is induced to show itself in the chilly evening air. Tin pots of water dipped up from a neighbouring creek are stuck against the quickly-dying flames, and by continued efforts of three cold, stiff men in supplying little twists of thorn, said water is at length boiled, –

tea from canvas bag thrown in, – bread and mutton produced from saddles, – and hunger kept down by a meal which has no name, but is classed and alluded to, in a general and apologetic manner, under the wretched denomination of "tucker."

"It gets cold and frosty; a few white ashes, and a few little ends of stick, no bigger than half lead-pencils, are all that is left of the fire: the breeze, which every now and then drives up the gully, flutters the wood-ashes, like feathers, into the air: – it is dark, and the air smells of night; we can't see our horses, and can only hear them grabbing and munching what coarse grass they can get; the stream near us, falling over boulder-rocks, sends up a chilly, splashing sound, disheartening and most inhospitable; – we feel as if the spray were falling down our backs; – we groan, – we suspect rheumatism in our shoulder-blades, – we take off our boots, – pull our socks over our trousers, – put on a tight worsted "jumper" over and above our daylight toggery, – and resign ourselves to our respective, but almost invisible, heaps of blankets spread upon the earth still black with yesterday's rain.

"Friend C., however, had no sooner lain down heavily upon his than, in what appeared to me a most unnecessary manner, he sprang insanely into the air, uttering a rapid string of observations, forcible, and very considerably to the point – as the

fact proved – for, not having been sufficiently wary in selecting his camping-ground, he had deposited his way-worn, weary frame upon the centre of a very flourishing spear-grass, which immediately entered a practical and very pointed protest against his occupation of its freehold. Growling, he re-arranged himself; we soothed, as well as we were able, his swelling soul, (not having it in our power to assist him physically,) and after looking up into the dark sky, full of stars, – the high mountains on each side of us, making us feel as if we were at the bottom of a deep black well, – we gradually become silent, – then oblivious, – then sleepers, – and then snorers; – at least though I heard, it not, I believe the night air did hear three weary men groan away on the wet ground, with the hollow of their saddles for pillows, a wet fog for curtains, and mountains six thousand feet high for the walls of their bedroom.

"The night went its way, I know; but how it went. I know not. Even before daybreak, – wakened by cold, – we were astir, and lit our wretched fire in the frosty air, the glimmering light round us being lent more from the stars, which were still shining, than from the day which was very coldly and slowly coming up over the tops of the mountains.

"After a reproduction of last night's nameless meal, we rolled our packs roughly together, crossed the river below us on horse-back, tethered our horses at the foot of the spurs on the other bank, and began to

climb the great sides of the range, at a point we had selected the night before.

"The hill was rather over eight thousand feet in height, and as we started, the hill-sides for miles were bathed in crimson morning color, making the white snow blush as the sun came up over the ranges beyond.

"We began the ascent, pushing up through wiry scrub, spear-grass, snow-grass, and blocks of rock for about three hours; and at the end of that time, the top being apparently quite close to us, we halted and sat down, considerably blown. After a pause, (which B. proposed to lengthen,) we started again, finding that grass and scrub had pretty well disappeared, and further on that an unmitigated mass of broken rock, – split sharp by the frost as if by a chisel, and in pieces varying in size from a small loaf to a large house, – covered the steep sides of the mountain whichever way we looked. There seemed to be split rock enough, and ready hewn, to build ten thousand cities. We stumbled and toiled up through this waste of stone, the sun glaring down pretty fiercely, and the sides getting steeper and rougher each step we took. We wondered, now and then, that we didn't reach the top; and at last, – agreeing that we must be near it now, – we again sat down.

"On resuming, B. was difficult to move on, but started at last. We reached a point where we could

only proceed by passing across the face of a broad and very steep slope formed by the perpetual slipping away of loose broken rock from a range of crags, rising perpendicularly into the air, above our heads.

"We introduced ourselves with some hesitation on to this doubtful-looking region. The slope was some five hundred feet, perhaps, from top to bottom, and almost too steep to walk upon; and the constant falling of rocks from such a height had formed a loose, unstable, and treacherous slope of split metal, varying in size from one's hand to one's head: in fact, in miniature, it might be compared to the steep slope at the end of a newly formed railway embankment.

"We proceeded in Indian file, one after the other, across this ominous region, the great perpendicular crags above looking down upon us threateningly. We had gained perhaps half way across, – and were ruefully thinking that even if we did cross safely, we must come back again, – when a slight rattle below us sounded out in the silent air with startling distinctness. We had scarcely stopped and had time to look sideways down into the gorge below, when we felt the rocks under our feet slip, and give, and glide, and our feet and ankles bury and bruise themselves among the loose shifting stones, – and what was much more seriously to the purpose, the split rock and slope, for fifty feet above us, beginning to pass down the side of the steep with a steady irresistible motion.

"I do not think we shall soon forget the alarming hollow rumble which filled the air in that lonely and inhospitable gorge. It sounded like the grim rattle of near thunder, – and, heard in the real danger in which we were placed, was really horrible. The fact was that our passing had set the shifting steep in motion, and both above and below us the whole mass was giving way, and passing in a body to the bottom.

"I can hardly imagine now how we missed being crushed by falling rocks and stones. I can only attribute our escape to the general movement of the whole mass at once: had the disturbance been only local and just around ourselves, I do not think we could have escaped without serious accident. As it was, with a few minutes of sullen mutterings and hollow echoes, the rattling died away about the crag-tops above us, and the slope was once more still and silent.

"I do not mind confessing that we were all three considerably shaken; and it was some time before we could do much more than wait to see whether the stony avalanche was really settled. We had crossed the worst and steepest half, and after some hesitation, resolved to push across to the further side rather than return by the way we had come; trusting to find, on the other face of the ridge, a safer way for our retreat. Without much idea of succeeding, we started, and reached, to our intense relief, the further edge of this treacherous mountain-depot of broken metal.

"Nothing but ceaseless rocks and split stones, – covered by great irregular patches of snow, of various depths, – succeeded: the climbing was severe and exhausting; B. became, without any question, pretty considerably done-up, and C. and self were not by any means over active.

"We thought we ought to have been at the top long ago, but it kept on keeping above us, to our intense disgust. B. said he thought we had "passed the top down below somewhere" – but B. was done-up, (and truth to tell so was I,) so we didn't give his opinions their due weight. As we at length neared the ridge, however, we all three began (B. having first set us the example) to fall down every twenty yards, in a promiscuous heap, without any notice whatever, and there lay, in any position in which we fell, for nearly a minute; then, dragging ourselves up again, we repeated the process as before.

"The rocks – for, snow excepted, nothing whatever else was to be seen – had for the last nearly perpendicular mile been larger than on the lower slopes of the mountain, and the snow-patches wider and deeper. We were extremely thirsty, and the barren rocky desert yielding no water, we ate or drank snow perpetually, sucking and sucking like three dry pumps. I quite lost count of the number of times we fell down, like helpless heaps, upon the stones; but at length, after almost giving up the attempt, we fell for the last time, exhausted but victorious, on the topmost crag of the range.

"I must say that the sight gained paid us with usury for the labor of gaining it.

"It was a fine bright day, with that clear New Zealand air which does not seem to check the sight, however great the distance the eye has to compass. To the East, the treacherous Pacific, like a great still blue lake, lay washing the coast for more than a hundred miles. Fifty miles South of us, the river Waitaki, running swiftly for the sea, made a gray line across the flats, and for sixty miles further and beyond, we could see rolling heaps of brown hills edged at last by the clear blue of the mid-day sky. Northward, we could look up the length of the island and see every feature clearly for a hundred and twenty miles. The main plains of the island lay spread out like one great, flat, brown paddock, with the mountains and the sea for a ring-fence, and the straight-running rivers for inside boundaries. Every now and then, at points here and there on the two great beaches of the island, – which, divided only by one hill, run unbroken for one hundred and thirty miles, – and just on the line where the blue sea met the low, brown land, we were able to catch little white rolls of foam breaking into sight and falling back, without a sound, into the sea again. We could trace distinctly all the rivers for a hundred miles to the North, and in their broad beds, here and there, a silver twinkle of water glistened against the sun.

"Westward, however, and immediately behind and

around us, the country and the outlook were as opposed to all this as if we had opened our eyes upon another island. We lay, – for we were too exhausted to stand, – upon the highest peak of a great spur or branch of mountain which led, without break, up to the Mount Cook range itself. We could see old Mount Cook (only a church-tower lower than Mont Blanc) in the very heart of the Southern Alps, lifting his cragged storm-beaten head thirteen thousand feet into the air, – as the bird flies, not ten miles from us, – his steep, glaciered sides sending back the sunlight with a dead white light, such as one sees shining from ground glass. I am quite hopeless of giving any idea of the frightful mass of mountainous chaos which lay between us and it, and for miles, as far as we could see, towards the western coast of the middle island. One feature, however, was common to all the confused sea of mountain-tops, winding impassable gorges, and steep, dangerous-looking slopes of stone on which we looked: – over each and all of them there lay the universal coating of split grey rock, save and except by valleys of crisp snow, here and there, uninterrupted and unbroken.

"The whole impression conveyed by looking behind us at this westward desert was, without exaggeration, hideous in the extreme. It would be impossible to conceive a more life-forgotten place, – a jumbled mass of mountain hurled into every chaotic shape

and position, towering up into ragged crags, lined with snow, and sinking down into low ghastly gorges, strewn with the ruins of great rocks which, during thousands of years, had been hurled from the heights above, crushing themselves to pieces as they fell.

"And here comes in a question to which I offer no answer; but would not the less respectfully receive one. Why does man, from his youth up, never cease to enjoy uproar and destruction, if only sufficiently wholesale?

"A huge block lay near us on the edge of the sharp ridge which formed the mountain peak, – a block which, even if we had left it, one more winter's storms and frosts would have undermined. Tired as we were, the destructive element asserted itself above our weariness, and we addressed our very exhausted powers to tilt about the biggest rock I ever saw moved without levers: but it had been so deeply underworked that, with scarcely any exertion on our part, and little hesitation on its own, it was toppled over the ridge. In all my life I never heard such a roar: down it plunged with great hammering blows amongst the legions of blocks below, splitting and scattering some, and sending hundreds of others on the same journey as itself, till it leaped headlong over the edge of a dark chasm where we could not follow it, and as it fell with a crash of thunder to the bottom of the gorge at last, sent up a roar of echoes

which pealed about the stony mountain-walls, till we thought thousands of their loose crags would have been shaken from their holdings by the uproar.

"It is one thing, however, to lie upon the edge of a mountain nine thousand feet high, and lazily eye the scenery north and south, or distract oneself from one's weariness by listening to the roar of big rocks toppled down into stony chasms; but it was quite another (at least to us it very materially altered the state of the case) when we remembered that we had to get down ourselves, – especially as the sun was fast sinking, and we poor chaps, though high enough in all conscience, aeronautically speaking, were yet physically and morally very low and prostrated. However, though B. proposed to take up a permanent residence there, – insisting that the only way to get him down was to keep on tipping him over, as we had served the rock, – yet we did at last, with many groans, make a start to return.

"Our descent was a succession of reckless rushes downwards, – whenever the size of the rocks allowed it, – alternated by helpless sinkings upon the stones, speechless masses of exhaustion: then, starting up again, regardless of each other, – knowing that we were all following the same reckless principles, – we took another desperate header down the mountain. By so doing, in about three hours we reached the first signs of scrub, and the first few blades of snow-grass which adventurously spread up from the vegetation

below. Here B. gave up. He lay down under a big rock, and protested, with what breath he had left him, against being disturbed any more. He argued his case in this way, – and though the matter really began to look serious, it was nevertheless awfully ridiculous. He lay in a shapeless bundle under the rock, exclaiming: "Am I or am I not a free-born Briton? Am I or am I not an M. P. C.? (member of the Province of Canterbury) – a C. S. O.? (Canterbury Stock-Owner), – because under each and all of these characters, I claim my indisputable right to lie down in a heap under a big rock, and to go to sleep at once, if I choose."

"B. however (as I think I have said before) was too done-up to be capable of forming a correct judgment; and here, as the matter had arrived at the serious point, B. in spite of his arguments, was summarily bundled up from his big rock, and hauled down the steep spur we were following, by main force.

"The sun had gone down for some time, and the night setting in made every step of the way more and more laborious. We reached our horses with great difficulty, having found their whereabouts by hearing their startled rush together, as they first caught sound of our distant treading among the rocks. Fortunately, none of them broke from their tether-ropes. We groped among the snow-grass and spear-grass for the saddles, – girthed-up and bridled by

guess-work, – lifted B. on to his steed like a heavy bag of potatoes, – crossed the river in pitch darkness, – and got back to our camping-ground in a state of the most abject exhaustion and fatigue. Even then, the horses had to be unsaddled and tethered out to feed, – and this securely, for the loss of horse means sometimes, in the interior, loss of man, too, – our blankets, thickly coated with heavy dew, to be shaken out and spread, and some junks of damper and mutton swallowed to stay hunger till morning. Then, not much before midnight, finally sinking, utterly used-up, on our camps, we slept heavily, till the frosty sun again climbed up over the stony peaks behind us.

"None of us ever remembered getting up from any night's camp so thoroughly stiffened and tired. I can only say that, from the terrific shaking we got in coming down over the slopes of rock in the nightfall, every muscle in our bodies shook and quivered for days, like shapes of jelly in a wheelbarrow. B. said he felt perfectly certain it was the highest mountain on the face of the known world. He declared that, if it had been eighteen inches higher, we could none of us ever have reached the top; – and he offered to make any amount of bets that, as we had been the first to ascend it, so we should be the last ever to toil up its stone-jointed ribs in the future.

"We then solemnly named it 'Mount Exhaustion,' – strapped up our blankets, stiff with

frost, – saddled, – bridled, – packed, – mounted, – and departed."

So ends the letter; – the reader has had it word for word; – but he will be relieved to know that we did not always bore our friends with quite so long a yarn.

No Personal Reflections.

THE expedition, of which the fore-quoted letter gives a day and night, continued for eight days; and at the end of that time one of the party struck away for a hundred and eighty-mile ride to town, and secured another fifty thousand acres, which we named "The Bracken Hills" one or two glimpses of whose occupation I propose to give the reader.

During the earlier days we were very rarely able to leave the run, and laboured under a disadvantage which perhaps has not been experienced by all who read this. We overlooked, in our first dray-load of

necessaries, an ornamental but useful accessory, consulted always by reflecting people once a day, sometimes twice a day, and by those more given to reflecting habits looked at, I am told, even three times in the twenty-four hours. A something too which really, from the elaboration of arrangement which I am informed is bestowed upon the mechanism of the head-dress of the day, must have become a very important and central feature in a modern toilet.

By a fatal oversight, the feature we omitted to take up was – a looking-glass; and the oversight of this very important feature produced the oversight of our very important features for nearly eighteen months. C. and I certainly got two looks at ourselves in distant glasses during that time, and we used to get a hazy and daguerreotypish idea as to how we were "getting on" in a bucket of still water. But this process, – to anyone who takes a true interest in himself, and is really concerned in ascertaining how he is "getting on," – I do not recommend, as, however clear the water may be, it has an obstinate tendency to produce a reflection such as we see offered to us, as ourselves, in the bowl of a spoon; and from experience, I am bound to say that it is at all times eminently indistinct and unsatisfactory.

A Starlight Camp.

Out of many hard nights during which we slept out in the early occupation of this back run I will take one, passed during an expedition to complete our knowledge of the hitherto untrodden country. The ranges of which it was chiefly composed lay about a hundred miles south of the first coast settlement, and fairly represented a fourth step in the climate of the country. The seasons, as nearly as I can describe them, were similar to those in the highlands of Switzerland. The spring broke late and tardily, and all through the year the mountains blocked out the sun, and made a short day. The summer was bright and clear, and the growth of grass, on the hill-sides, luxuriant and rapid. The autumn days were clear and bracing, and early gave hints of coming winter; and the winter itself was a hard season for unprepared settlers to meet. Heavy snow covered up the country, and hard frosts kept it there for weeks. It was indeed the outermost edge of the available half of the colony, and anyone first settling there had to expect a tolerably hard time; and it is to be remembered that, before we camped there, no human being had put foot upon the ground.

I take an account of our first night's sojourn upon it from another home letter of the time, and I have ventured to choose it from among others, because it describes the night (not a whit the less truthfully) from a rather more ideal point of view than the matter-of-fact relations I have given before.

"You may imagine to yourselves," – it says, – "the old picture, – a still, starlight night in a wild, silent valley, bounded in by lofty hills which rise in the close back ground to steep mountain ranges: their sides furrowed with black storm-worn gorges, and their summits sheeted with driven snow. Enter – slowly passing round the foot of a steep spur – a mounted figure, followed closely by two companions, also mounted, and driving a pack horse. The three riders draw their horses' heads together and hold a consultation in which something is said about 'getting late,' – 'camping down,' – 'plenty of firewood,' – and 'tethering ground.' Party then move forward, and having reached the centre of a small open ground formed by a slight falling back of the hills from the gorge, one by one dismount, – girths are slackened, away come saddles and bridles, tether-ropes are unpacked from the pack-horse, and the three riders depart with their several steeds to secure them for the night.

"In about a quarter of an hour they re-appear; the blankets and other trappings are cleared from the saddles, and a figure, bearing a quart pot, feels

his way down to the river which is rumbling over a rocky bed just below the camp. Figures two and three pitch one of the blankets to serve as a low tent, – the striking of a match is heard, – and in a minute more the bright blaze of a camp-fire leaps into the night air, – and hills, clouds, snow, river, and mountains vanish from the eyes of the explorers, and a black darkness closes round the camp and shuts it in.

"By the flicker of the light you can look at them for a moment seated on a stone, or stretched full length upon the ground, eating with clasp knives, and drinking out of battered quart pots: their horses tethered within a stone's throw, champing the rough grass, laden already with the heavy falling dew. The night meanwhile sets in cold, and in another half-hour the last flickering flame of the camp-fire has leapt into the air, and died away, and river, hill, and mountain again move out around the camp, and look down upon the explorers resting tired and silent upon their mother earth.

"After a time, slowly over the jagged peaks of the mountain-tops rises the full quiet moon, her light falling softly on the glittering river, and lighting up the snow above with a million silver sparkles: the moon that has but just shone quietly upon the peaceful roofs of the fatherland looks silently now into the untrodden New Zealand gorge; higher she mounts, and higher yet among the clouds; and still,

and very silent grows the night, as dropping down behind the western hills the trembling stars sink one by one away. Sometimes a wandering breeze sighs slowly by; it might bear with it some bright spirit not of earth, so softly does it wave the drooping leaves, so gently die away: then sails a floating cloud across the moon and hides her light; the wind sweeps by again, – a stronger blast, – and driving far into the darkened shadows of the gorge, might be some wandering, lost, and unblest soul, sorrowing for evermore, so mournfully and bitterly does it wail and sigh. The cloud holds on its way and passes by, and its huge shade sweeps swiftly up the mountain side: the moon looks out, and plays again upon the falling water, and brighter still lights up the driven snow. So one by one the silent hours pass on, uncounted by the tired sleepers on the ground, and the night wears away, till pales the silver shining of the moon, the grey dawn breaks, and morning fills the air, and heralded by flags of crimson in the eastern sky, the untired sun, waving farewells to all you in England, comes up above the hills, and gives the wakened sleepers back the day again."

Very shortly after sunrise the explorers have mounted their horses, and broken up their camp, and ride away, leaving with something like regret the mountain hollow which has been their shelter for the night.

The Old Horse and the New Chum.

NEW country, especially if distant and difficult to get at, was frequently stocked, at first, with cattle instead of sheep; – cattle being stronger and hardier, and more easily pushed through rough country and high rivers. And on runs so stocked, some very rough times turned up. The cattle, as a rule, were half-wild, restless brutes, imported from Australian back stations, or bred on the equally wild ranges to the north of our own island. There was nothing for it but literally to lick them into shape.

On the drive, or on the run, or in the yards, – 'twas all the same: they just persistently continued wild, obstreporous, cantankerous, and at shortest notice, dangerous.

In the yards, (when they could be yarded) they plunged, and lunged, and hauched each other and everything near them, and crushed and jammed themselves into crowds, weighing scores of tons-

against the yard sides. They tore up the ground under-foot in the stockyards in winter, and churned it into knee-deep sloughs of despond, where the stockmen would often leave a smothered boot. It took a plucky hand to get in among them; there were often two or three head, actively vicious, who took every chance to knock a man over; and the jam and confusion was such, that at any moment an unintentional bullock or two might be driven smash against a man before he could clear out of the road.

I have often admired the pluck with which more than one man I could name worked all day long in the yards at branding, (and much more severe measures,) in the very midst of these brutes. I think the pluckiest man I remember was the son of a clergyman in North Devon; though lots of the stockmen were almost equally game.

The cattle, one after another, had to be roped over the horns, – hauled to the yard corner, – thrown, – branded with letters four inches long in red hot iron, – and, if necessary, much more acutely operated upon; and the kicking, plunging, hauching, and bellowing at these times, were beyond any description on paper.

The whole process involved risk of limb the whole day long, and I don't think an insurance company would flourish particularly like a green bay-tree, if it indulged too much in insuring the lives of policyholders engaged in this profession.

In tackling these cattle out on the runs, the stockmen had their work cut out, and the horses too. The cattle were not far off from being as active as stags, and to race them, – with the addition of a hundred and thirty to two hundred and fifty pounds of stockman on his back, – was no easy "role" for a stock-horse.

The horses were often, however, wonderfully eager and clever at it, – cutting out and dodging single beasts with extraordinary sagacity and spirit.

A new chum had to look out, if he found his leg over a horse who knew what was what; for the experienced quadruped would require and give no notice of the correct thing to do at any pinch. If the bullock swayed he'd sway, – if he dodged, the dodge would be doubled, – if he pulled up hard and "slewed" sharp round on his heels, the stock-horse would come up standing, just as quickly, and be round on his flank in a second.

It took a staunch seat and good girths to stand it, – and the new chum had to take his first instructions in the accomplishment of retaining a residence on the pig-skin just in the way Mr. Artist has shown.

It used to be difficult to say which was the most astonished, the new chum, or the old horse; for the horse, of course, was so successfully demoralised at getting a man "kelumpus" on his ears and neck, that all idea of dodging was knocked out of his

[Inserted unpaginated illustration]

THE OLD HORSE AND THE NEW CHUM.

head, and the bullock plunged by, and went off with tail in the wind.

For the subsequent condition of the new chum's teeth, please apply to the owner.

Dog's Leg and Lobster Salad.

AS the later explorers were wandering about, seeking for and stocking unoccupied tracts of country, the earlier squatters, who had penetrated into the interior, were beginning to get about them many comforts, and civilised and commodious homesteads.

After two years' delay, the runs we had first taken up having been at length laid off by the Government, we had got up a very comfortable house; and though one hundred and twenty miles from the capital (Christchurch), had established all sorts of luxurious institutions, including the weekly washerwoman, and the daily gravy. The house was placed in a warm sunny valley, in which the snow rarely lay for more than three days, and the neighbouring

country was comparatively low, and richly grassed: yet, at that very moment, and within fifty miles of the house, funny times were still passing.

One evening, I remember, a neighbouring back-station holder, after a long day's journey, rode up late along the fence-side of our home-paddocks, amidst a chorus of challenge from the sheep-dogs.

As he sat in the evening in our sitting-room, (for at this pitch of luxury we had arrived), he told us his experiences of a few days before. He had ridden back from his own run to a new-formed out-station, on the far side of a big river. On arrival at a wind-beaten, solitary hut, two gaunt-looking men saluted him at the door. He dismounted, and ascertained that they were awaiting the arrival of a dray with stores, and were, to use an universal and descriptive expression, pre-eminently "hard-up:" – so pre-eminently hard-up indeed, that for years afterwards it was currently reported that, on entering the hut, he found that they were burning the last piece of their last tea-chest to cook the last leg of their last dog. For the exact and categorical truth of this generally believed fact I do not wish very positively to vouch; but there can be no manner of doubt, that the two gaunt individuals at the hut were very much more straitened in their larder and cellar department than the reader would like to be to-morrow morning; and at all events there is no shadow of question that they were, as I have said, pre-eminently hard-up.

Yet again, (and the reader will please excuse the kaleidoscope fashion in which I am bringing the colonial picture before him), at this very time, we travelled with our evening guest over the hundred and twenty miles to town, and there found what really might have been taken for another country.

The town Christchurch having become a photograph of modern towns, and a ball being imminent, our late guest, (who five days before had cooked his own chops, and been strictly his own washerwoman), had to reduce himself to the black-beetle appearance of the evening exquisite of the nineteenth century, – to adopt an eccentric collar, and white tie, – to adorn himself with a pair of eight-and-a-quarter white kid gloves, – to engage himself for a gallop, – to "believe the next was his waltz," – to talk quadrille-talk, – and to walk about arm-in-arm nowhere, and appear radiantly happy about nothing: – and more than this, to rush about with ices, and eat and drink rolled turkey and champagne, and ornamental Jelly, and game pie, and tipsy cake, and lobster salad, – all in wrong course and out of order, – just as the most advanced and polished exquisite does in this happy, finished, velvet country of England.

5 Christmas and Midsummer days – among the ranges foot to foot with old England – come over the hills on the same morning.

[Pages 210-234]

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-

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

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

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

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,

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

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:

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.

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

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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.

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

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.

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-

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.

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

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;

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

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

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."

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.

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