A First Year in Canterbury Settlement by Samuel Butler ~ Full Audiobook
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Section 1 of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement by Samuel Butler Section 1 Introduction and Preface Introduction by R. A. Streetfield Since Butler's death in 1902, his fame has spread so rapidly, and the world of letters now takes so keen an interest in the man and his writings, that no apology is necessary for the replication of even his least significant works.

I had long desired to bring out a new edition of his earliest book, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, together with the other pieces that he wrote during his residence in New Zealand, and, that wish being now realized, I have added a supplementary group of pieces written during his undergraduate days at Cambridge, so that the present volume forms a tolerably complete record of Butler's literary activity up to the days of Erewhon.

the only omission of any importance being that of his pamphlet published anonymously in eighteen sixty five the evidence for the resurrection of jesus christ as contained in the four evangelists critically examined i have not reprinted this because practically the whole of it was incorporated into the fair haven

a first year in canterbury settlement has long been out of print and copies of the original edition are difficult to procure butler professed to think poorly of it writing in eighteen eighty nine to his friend alfred marx who had picked up a second-hand copy and felt some doubt as to its authorship he said i am afraid the little book you have referred to was written by me

"'My people edited my letters home. "'I did not write freely to them, of course, "'because they were my people. "'If I was at all free or anywhere, "'they'd cut it out before printing it. "'Besides, I had not yet shed my Cambridge skin, "'and its trail is everywhere, I am afraid, perceptible. "'I have never read the book myself.'

i dipped into a few pages when they sent it to me in new zealand but saw prig written upon them so plainly that i read no more and never have and never mean to i am told the book sells for one pound a copy in new zealand

in fact last autumn i know sir walter buller gave that for a copy in england so as a speculation it is worth two shillings sixpence or three shillings i stole a passage or two from it for eriwan meaning to let it go and never be reprinted during my lifetime this must be taken with a grain of salt

it was butler's habit sometimes to entertain his friends and himself by speaking of his own words with studied disrespect as when with reference to his own darwin and the origin of species which also is reprinted in this volume he described philosophical dialogues as the most offensive form except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries that even literature can assume and

The circumstances which led to a first year being written have been fully described by Mr. Festing Jones in his sketch of Butler's life, prefixed to The Humor of Homer, Fifield, London, 1913, Kennerley, New York.

and I will only briefly recapitulate them. Butler left England for New Zealand in September 1859, remaining in the colony until 1864. A first year was published in 1863, in Butler's name by his father, who contributed a short preface, stating that the book was compiled from his son's journal and letters, with extracts from two papers contributed to The Eagle, the magazine of St. John's College, Cambridge.

These two papers had appeared in 1861 in the form of three articles entitled Our Emigrant and signed Salarius. By comparing these articles with a book as published by Butler's father, it is possible to arrive at some conclusion as to the amount of editing to which Butler's prose was submitted. Some passages in the articles do not appear in the book at all.

others appear unaltered others again have been slightly doctored apparently with the object of robbing them of a certain youthful cocksureness which probably grated upon the paternal nerves but seems to me to create an atmosphere of engaging freshness which i miss in the edited version so much of the our immigrant articles is repeated in a first year

almost if not quite verbatim that it did not seem worth while to reprint the articles in their entirety i have however included in this collection one extract from the latter which was not incorporated into a first year

though it describes at greater length an incident referred to on page 74. From this extract, which I have called Crossing the Rangitata, readers will be able to see for themselves how fresh and spirited Butler's original descriptions of his adventures were, and will probably regret that he did not take the publication of A First Year into his own hands instead of allowing his father to have a hand in it.

with regard to the other pieces included in this volume i have thought it best to prefix brief notes when necessary to each in turn explaining the circumstances in which they were written and when it was possible giving the date of composition in preparing the book for publication i have been materially helped by friends in both hemispheres

my thanks are especially due to miss colborne veal of christchurch n z for copying some of bottler's early contributions to the press and in particular for her kindness in allowing me to make use of her notes on the english cricketers

to mr a t bartholomew for his courtesy in allowing me to reprint his article on butler and the simeonites which had originally appeared in the cambridge magazine of march one nineteen thirteen and throws so interesting a light on a certain passage in the way of all flesh

the article is here reprinted by the kind permission of the editor and proprietor of the cambridge magazine to mr j f harris for his generous assistance in tracing and copying several of butler's early contributions to the eagle to mr w h triggs the editor of the press for allowing me to make use of much interesting matter relating to butler that has appeared in the columns of that journal and lastly to mr henry festing jones whose help and counsel

have been as invaluable to me in preparing this volume for the press as they have been in past years in the case of other works by butler that i have been privileged to edit r a streetfield

preface by the rev thomas butler the writer of the following pages having resolved on emigrating to new zealand took his passage in the ill-fated ship burmah which never reached her destination and is believed to have perished with all on board his berth was chosen and the passage money paid when important alterations were made in the arrangements of the vessel in order to make room for some stock which was being sent out to canterbury settlement

The space left for the accommodation of the passengers, being thus curtailed, and the comforts of the voyage, seemingly likely to be much diminished, the writer was, most providentially, induced to change his ship, and, a few weeks later, secured a berth in another vessel. The work is compiled from the actual letters and journal of a young emigrant, with extracts from two papers contributed by him to the Eagle.

a periodical issued by some members of St. John's College, Cambridge, at which the writer took his degree. This variety in the sources from which the materials are put together must be the apology for some defects in their connection and coherence. It is hoped also that the circumstances of bodily fatigue and actual difficulty under which they were often written will excuse many faults of style.

for whatever of presumption may appear in giving this little book to the public the friends of the writer alone are answerable it was at their wish only that he consented to its being printed it is however submitted to the reader in the hope that the unbiased impressions of colonial life as they fell freshly on a young mind may not be wholly devoid of interest

its value to his friends at home is not diminished by the fact that the manuscript having been sent out to new zealand for revision was on its return lost in the colombo and was fished up from the indian ocean so nearly washed out as to have been with some difficulty deciphered it should be further stated for the encouragement of those who think of following the example of the author and emigrating to the same settlement

that his most recent letters indicate that he has no reason to regret the step that he has taken, and that the results of his undertaking have hitherto fully justified his expectations. Langer Rectory, June 29, 1863. End of section 1.

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I'm saving so much! Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? You'll love the deals. You'll love Burlington. I told you so. Chapter 1 of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement by Samuel Butler. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Gail Timmerman Vaughan. Chapter 1. Embarkation at Gravesend.

arrest of passenger tilbury fort deal bay of biscay gale becalmed off teneriffe fire in the galley trade winds belt of calms death on board shark current south-east trade winds temperature birds southern cross cyclone

"'It is a windy, rainy day, cold withal. "'A little boat is putting off from the pier at Gravesend "'and making for a ship that is lying moored in the middle of the river. "'Therein are some half-dozen passengers "'and a lot of heterogeneous-looking luggage. "'Among the passengers, and the owner of some of the most heterogeneous "'of the luggage, is myself. "'The ship is an emigrant ship, and I am one of the emigrants. "'On having clambered over the ship's side and found myself on deck,'

I was somewhat taken aback with the apparently inextricable confusion of everything on board. The slush upon the decks, the crying, the kissing, the mustering of the passengers, the stowing away of baggage still left upon the decks, the rain, and the gloomy sky, created a kind of half-amusing, half-distressing bewilderment, which I could plainly see to be participated in by most of the other landsmen on board.

Honest country agriculturalists and their wives were looking as though they wondered what it would end in. Some were sitting on their boxes and making a show of reading tracts which were being presented to them by a serious-looking gentleman in a white tie. But all day long they had perused the first page only. At least I saw none turn over the second. And so the afternoon wore on, wet, cold, and comfortless.

"'No dinner served on account of the general confusion. "'The immigration commissioner was taking a final survey of the ship "'and shaking hands with this, that, and the other of the passengers.'

Fresh arrivals kept continually creating a little additional excitement. These were saloon passengers who alone were permitted to join the ship at Gravesend. By and by, a couple of policemen made their appearance and arrested one of the party, a London cabman, for debt. He had a large family and a subscription was soon started to pay the sum he owed.

subsequently a much larger subscription would have been made in order to have him taken away by anybody or anything little by little the confusion subsided the emigration commissioner left at six we were at last allowed some victuals unpacking my books and arranging them in my cabin filled up the remainder of the evening save the time devoted to a couple of meditative pipes

the emigrants went to bed and when at about ten o'clock i went up for a little time upon the poop i heard no sound save the clanging of the clocks from the various churches of gravesend the pattering of rain upon the decks and the rushing of the river as it gurgled against the ship's side

Early next morning the cocks began to crow vociferously. We had about sixty couple of the oldest inhabitants of the hen-roost on board, which were intended for the consumption of the saloon passengers. A destiny which they have since fulfilled. Young fowls die on shipboard, only old ones standing the weather about the line. Besides this the pigs began grunting, and the sheep gave vent to an occasional feeble bleat.

the only expression of surprise or discontent which i heard them utter during the remainder of their existence for now alas they are no more i remembered dreaming i was in a farmyard and woke as soon as it was light rising immediately i went on deck and found the morning calm and sulky no rain but everything very wet and very grey

there was tilbury fort so different from stansfield's dashing picture there was gravesend which but a year before i had passed on my way to antwerp with so little notion that i should ever leave it thus

Musing in this way and taking a last look at the green fields of old England, soaking with rain and comfortless though they then looked, I soon became aware that we had weighed anchor and that a small steam tug which had been getting her steam up for some little time had already begun to subtract a mite of the distance between ourselves and New Zealand. And so, early in the morning of Saturday, October 1, 1859, we started on our voyage."

the river widened out hour by hour soon our little steam-tug left us a fair wind sprung up and at two o'clock or thereabouts we found ourselves off ramsgate here we anchored and waited till the tide early next morning this took us to deal off which we again remained a whole day on monday morning we weighed anchor and since then we have had it on the forecastle and trust we may have no further occasion for it until we arrive at new zealand

i will not waste time and space by describing the horrible seasickness of most of the passengers a misery which i did not myself experience nor yet will i prolong the narrative of our voyage down the channel it was short and eventless the captain says there is more danger between gravesend and start point where we lost sight of land than all the way between there and new zealand

fogs are so frequent and collisions occur so often our own passage was free from adventure in the bay of biscay the water assumed a blue hue of almost incredible depth there moreover we had our first touch of a gale not that it deserved to be called a gale in comparison with what we have since experienced still we learned what double reefs meant after this the wind felt very light and continued so for a few days

on referring to my diary i perceived that on the tenth of october we had only got as far south as the forty-first parallel of latitude and late on that night a heavy squall coming up from the south-west brought a foul wind with it it soon freshened and by two o'clock in the morning the noise of the flapping sails as the men were reefing them and of wind roaring through the rigging was deafening

all next day we lay hove-to under a close-reefed main topsail which being interpreted means that the only sail set was the main topsail and that that was close-reefed moreover that the ship was laid at right angles to the wind and the yards braced sharp up thus the ship drifts very slowly and remains steadier than she would otherwise she ships few or no seas and though she rolls a good deal is much more easy and safe than when running at all near the wind

next day we drifted due north and on the third day the fury of the gale having somewhat moderated we resumed not our course but a course only four points off it the next several days we were baffled by foul winds jammed down on the coast of portugal and then we had another gale from the south not such a one as the last but still enough to drive us many miles out of our course and then it fell calm which was almost worse

for when the wind fell the sea rose and we were tossed about in such a manner as would have forbidden even morpheus himself to sleep and so we crawled on till on the morning of the twenty fourth of october by which time if we had had anything like luck we should have been close on the line we found ourselves about thirty miles from the peak of teneriffe becalmed this was a long way out of our course which lay three or four degrees to the westward at the very least

but the sight of the peak was a great treat, almost compensating for past misfortunes. The island of Tenerife lies in latitude 28 degrees, longitude 16 degrees. It is about 60 miles long. Towards the southern extremity, the peak towers upwards to a height of 12,300 feet, far above the other land of the island, though that, too, is very elevated and rugged.

Our telescopes revealed serrated gullies upon the mountainsides and showed us the fastnesses of the island in a manner that made us long to explore them. We deceived ourselves with the hope that some speculative fisherman might come out to us with oranges and grapes for sale.

he would have realized a handsome sum if he had but unfortunately none was aware of the advantages offered and so we looked and longed in vain the other islands were palma gomera and faro all of them lofty especially palma all of them beautiful on the seaboard of palma we could detect houses innumerable it seemed to be very thickly inhabited and carefully cultivated

"'The calm continuing three days, "'we took stock of the islands pretty minutely, "'clear as they were, "'and rarely obscured even by a passing cloud.'

the weather was blazing hot but beneath the awning it was very delicious a calm however is a monotonous thing even when an island like teneriffe is in view and we soon tired both of it and of the gambols of the black fish a species of whale and the operations on board an american vessel hard by on the evening of the third day a light air sprung up and we watched the islands gradually retire into the distance

Next morning they were faint and shrunken, and by midday they were gone. The wind was the commencement of the northeast trades. On the next day, Thursday, October 27, lat 27 degrees, 40 minutes, the cook was boiling some fat in a large saucepan, when the bottom burnt through, and the fat fell out over the fire, got lighted, and then ran about the whole galley, blazing and flaming, as though it would set the place on fire, whereat an alarm of fire was raised.

the effect of which was electrical there is no real danger about the affair for a fire is easily extinguishable on a ship when only above board it is when it breaks out in the hold is unperceived gains strength and finally bursts its prison that it becomes a serious matter to extinguish it

this was quenched in five minutes but the faces of the female steerage passengers were awful i noticed about many a peculiar contraction and elevation of one eyebrow which i had never seen before on the living human face though often in pictures i don't mean to say that all the faces of all the saloon passengers were void of any emotion whatever

"'The trades carried us down to latitude nine degrees. "'They were but light when they lasted, and left us soon. "'There is no wind more agreeable than the northeast trades. "'The sun keeps the air deliciously warm, "'the breeze deliciously fresh. "'The vessel sits bolt upright, "'steering a south-southwest course, "'with the wind nearly aft. "'She glides along with scarcely any perceptible motion. "'Sometimes in the cabin, "'one would fancy one must be on dry land.'

the sky is of a grayish blue and the sea silvery gray with a very slight haze round the horizon the water is very smooth even with a wind which would elsewhere raise a considerable sea in latitude nineteen degrees longitude twenty five degrees we first fell in with flying fish these are usually in flocks and are seen in greatest abundance in the morning they fly a great way and very well

not with the kind of jump which a fish takes when springing out of the water but with a bona fide flight sometimes close to the water sometimes some feet above it one flew on board and measured roughly eighteen inches between the tips of its wings on saturday november five the trades left us suddenly after a thunderstorm which gave us an opportunity of seeing chain lightning

which I only remember to have seen once in England. As soon as the storm was over, we perceived that the wind was gone and knew that we had entered that unhappy region of calms, which extends over a belt of some five degrees, rather to the north of the line. We knew that the weather about the line was often calm, but had pictured to ourselves a gorgeous sun, golden sunsets, cloudless sky, and sea of the deepest blue.

on the contrary such weather is never known there or only by mistake it is a gloomy region sombre sky and sombre sea large cauliflower headed masses of dazzling cumulus tower in front of a background of lavender-coloured satin there are clouds of every shape and size

the sails idly flap as the sea rises and falls with a heavy regular but windless swell creaking yards and groaning rudder seem to lament that they cannot get on

The horizon is hard and black, save when blent softly into the sky upon one quarter or another by a rapidly approaching squall. A puff of wind, quote, square the yards, end quote. The ship steers again. Another, she moves slowly onward. It blows. She slips through the water. It blows hard. She runs very hard. She flies. A drop of rain. The wind lulls. Three or four more of the size of half a crown.

it falls very light it rains hard and then the wind is dead whereon the rain comes down in a torrent which those must see who would believe the air is so highly charged with moisture that any damp thing remains damp and any dry thing dampens the decks are always wet mould springs up anywhere even on the very boots which one is wearing

the atmosphere is like that of a vapor bath and the dense clouds seem to ward off the light but not the heat of the sun the dreary monotony of such weather affects the spirits of all and even the health of some one poor girl who had long been consumptive but who apparently had rallied much during the voyage seemed to give way suddenly as soon as we had been a day in this belt of calms

and four days after we lowered her over the ship's side into the deep one day we had a little excitement in capturing a shark whose triangular black fin had been veering about above water for some time at a little distance from the ship i will not detail a process that has so often been described

but will content myself with saying that he did not die unavenged inasmuch as he administered a series of cuffs and blows to any one that was near him which would have done credit to a prize-fighter and several of the men got severe handling or i should rather say tailing from him he was accompanied by two beautifully striped pilot-fish the never-failing attendants of the shark

one day during this calm we fell in with a current when the aspect of the sea was completely changed it resembled a furiously rushing river and had the sound belonging to a strong stream only much intensified the waves too tossed up their heads perpendicularly into the air whilst the empty flower casks drifted ahead of us and to one side it was impossible to look at the sea without noticing its very singular appearance

soon a wind springing up raised the waves and obliterated the more manifest features of the current but for two or three days afterwards we could perceive it more or less there is always at this time of year a strong westerly set here the wind was the commencement of the south-east trades and was welcomed by all with the greatest pleasure in two more days we reached the line

we crossed the line far too much to the west in longitude thirty one degrees six minutes after a very long passage of nearly seven weeks such as our captain says he never remembers to have made

fine winds however now began to favour us and in another week we got out of the tropics having had the sun vertically overhead so as to have no shadow on the preceding day strange to say the weather was never at all oppressively hot after latitude two degrees north or thereabouts a fine wind or indeed a light wind at sea removes all unpleasant heat even of the hottest and most perpendicular sun

the only time that we suffered any inconvenience at all from heat was during the belt of calms when the sun was vertically over our heads it felt no hotter than on an ordinary summer day immediately however upon leaving the tropics the cold increased sensibly and in latitude twenty seven degrees eight minutes i find that i was not warm once all day since then we have none of us ever been warm save when taking exercise or in bed

when the thermometer was up at fifty degrees we thought it very high and called it warm the reason of the much greater cold of the southern than of the northern hemisphere is that the former contains so much less land i have not seen the thermometer below forty two degrees in my cabin but am sure that outside it has often been very much lower we almost all got chillblains and wondered much what the winter of this hemisphere must be like if this was its summer

I believe, however, that as soon as we got off the coast of Australia, which I hope we may do in a couple of days, we shall feel a sensible rise in the thermometer at once. Had we known what was coming, we should have prepared better against it, but we were most of us under the impression that it would be warm summer weather all the way. No doubt we felt it more than we should otherwise, on account of our having so lately crossed the line.

the great feature of the southern seas is the multitude of birds which inhabit it huge albatrosses mollimocks a smaller albatross cape hens cape pigeons parsons boobies whale-birds mutton-birds and many more wheel continually about the ship's stern sometimes in dozens sometimes in scores always in considerable numbers

If a person takes two pieces of pork and ties them together, leaving perhaps a yard of string between the two pieces, and then throws them into the sea, one albatross will catch hold of one end and another of the other. Each bolts his own end and then tugs in fights with his rival till one or the other has to discourage his prize. We have not, however, succeeded in catching any. Neither have we tried the above experiment upon ourselves.

albatrosses are not white they are grey or brown with a white streak down the back and spreading a little into the wings the under part of the bird is a bluish white they remain without moving the wing a longer time than any bird that i have ever seen but some suppose that each individual feather is vibrated rapidly though in a very small space without any motion being imparted to the main pinions of the wing

i am informed that there is a strong muscle attached to each of the large plumes in their wings it certainly is strange how so large a bird should be able to travel so far and so fast without any motion of the wing albatrosses are often entirely brown but farther south and when old i am told they become sometimes quite white the stars of the southern hemisphere are lauded by some i cannot see that they surpass or equal those of the northern

some of course are the same the southern cross is a very great delusion it isn't a cross it's a kite a kite upside down an irregular kite upside down with only three respectable stars and one very poor and very much out of place

near it however is a truly mysterious and interesting object called the coal-sack it is a black patch in the sky distinctly darker than all the rest of the heavens no star shines through it the proper name for it is the black magellan cloud

we reached the cape passing about six degrees south of it and twenty-five days after crossing the line a very fair passage and since the cape we have done well until a week ago when after a series of very fine runs and during as fair a breeze as one would wish to see we were some of us astonished to see the captain giving orders to reef top-sails

the royals were stowed so were the topgallant sails topsails close reefed mainsail reefed and just at ten forty five p m as i was going to bed i heard the captain give the order to take a reef in the foresail and furl the mainsail but before i was in bed a quarter of an hour afterwards a blast of wind came up like a wall and all night it blew a regular hurricane

the glass which had dropped very fast all day and fallen lower than the captain had ever seen it in the southern hemisphere had given him warning what was coming and he had prepared for it that night we ran away before the wind to the north next day we lay hove-to till evening and two days afterwards the gale was repeated but with still greater violence

the captain was all ready for it and a ship if she is a good sea-boat may laugh at any winds or any waves provided she be prepared the danger is when a ship has got all sails set and one of these bursts of wind is shot out at her then her masts go overboard in no time sailors generally estimate a gale of wind by the amount of damage it does

if they don't lose a mast or get their bulwarks washed away or at any rate carry away a few sails then they don't call it a gale but a stiff breeze if however they are caught even by comparatively a very inferior squall and lose something they call it a gale the captain assured us that the sea never assumes a much grander or imposing aspect than that which it wore on this occasion

he called me to look at it between two and three in the morning when it was at its worst it was certainly very grand and made a tremendous noise and the wind would scarcely let one stand and made such a roaring in the rigging as i never heard but there was not that terrific appearance that i had expected it didn't suggest any ideas to one's mind about the possibility of anything happening to one

it was excessively unpleasant to be rolled hither and thither and i never felt the force of gravity such a nuisance before one soup at dinner would face one at an angle of forty-five degrees with the horizon

it would look as though immovable on a steep inclined plane and it required the nicest handling to keep the plane truly horizontal so with one's tea which would alternately rush forward to be drunk and fly as though one were a tantalus so with one's goods which would be seized with the most erratic propensities

still we were unable to imagine ourselves in any danger save that one flaxen-headed youth of two-and-twenty kept waking up his companion for the purpose of saying to him at intervals during the night i say isn't it awful till finally silenced him with a boot

While on the subject of storms, I may add that a captain, if at all a scientific man, can tell whether he is in a cyclone, as we were, or not. And if he is in a cyclone, he can tell in what part of it he is, and how he must steer so as to get out of it. A cyclone is a storm that moves in a circle around a column of greater or less diameter.

the calm moves forward in the centre of the rotatory storm at the rate of from one or two to thirty miles an hour a large cyclone five hundred miles in diameter rushing furiously round its centre will still advance in a right line only very slowly indeed a small one fifty or sixty miles across will progress more rapidly

One vessel sailed for five days at the rate of 12, 13, and 14 knots an hour round one of these cyclones before the wind all the time. Yet in the five days she had made only 187 miles in a straight line. I tell this tale as it was told to me, but have not studied the subjects myself.

whether saloon passengers may think about a gale of wind i am sure that the poor sailors who have to go aloft in it and reef topsails cannot welcome it with any pleasure chapter one why is life better with american family insurance

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CHAPTER II. LIFE ON BOARD. CALM. BOAT LOWERED. SNARES AND TRAPS. LAND. DRIVEN OFF COAST. ENTER PORT LITTLETON. REQUISITES FOR A SEA VOYAGE. SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE AROUZED.

Before continuing the narrative of my voyage, I must turn to other topics and give you some account of my life on board. My time has passed very pleasantly. I have read a good deal. I have nearly finished Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, am studying Liebig's Agricultural Chemistry, and learning the concertina on the instrument of one of my fellow passengers.

besides this i have had the getting up and management of our choir we practise three or four times a week we chant the venite glorias and te deums and sing one hymn i have two basses two tenors one alto and lots of girls

and the singing certainly is better than you would hear in nine country places out of ten i have been glad by this means to form the acquaintance of many of the poorer passengers my health has been very good all the voyage i have not had a day's sea-sickness the provisions are not very first-rate and the day after to-morrow being christmas day we shall sigh for the roast beef of old england as our dinner will be somewhat of the meagrest never mind

on the whole i cannot see reason to find any great fault we have a good ship a good captain and victuals sufficient in quantity everyone but myself abuses the owners like pickpockets but i rather fancy that some of them will find themselves worse off in new zealand

when i come back if i live to do so and i sometimes amass a wonderful fortune in a very short time and come back fabulously rich and do all sorts of things i think i shall try the overland route almost every evening four of us have a very pleasant rubber which never gets stale so you will have gathered that though very anxious to get to our journey's end which with luck we hope to do in about three weeks time

still the voyage has not proved at all the unbearable thing that some of us imagined it would have been one great amusement i have forgotten to mention that is shuffleboard a game which consists in sending some round wooden platters along the deck into squares chalked and numbered from one to ten

this game will really keep one quite hot in the coldest weather if played with spirit during the month that has elapsed since writing the last sentence we have had strong gales and long tedious calms on one of these occasions the captain lowered a boat and a lot of us scrambled over the ship's side and got in taking it in turns to row the first thing that surprised us was the very much warmer temperature of the sea level than that on deck

the change was astonishing i have suffered from a severe cold ever since my return to the ship on deck it was cold thermometer forty six degrees on the sea-level it was deliciously warm the next thing that surprised us was the way in which the ship was pitching though it appeared a dead calm up she rose and down she fell upon a great hummocky swell

which came lazily up from the southwest making our horizon from the boat all uneven on deck we had thought it a very slight swell in the boat we perceived what a heavy humpy ungainly heap of waters kept rising and sinking all round us sometimes blocking out the whole ship save the top of the main royal in the strangest way in the world

we pulled round the ship thinking we had never seen in our lives anything so beautiful as she looked in that sunny morning when suddenly we saw a large ripple in the waters not far off at first the captain imagined it to have been caused by a whale and was rather alarmed but by and by it turned out to be nothing but a shoal of fish then we made for a large piece of seaweed which we had seen some way astern

It extended some ten feet deep, and was a huge, tangled, loose, floating mass. Among it nestled little fishes innumerable, and as we looked down amid its intricate branches, through the sunlit azure of the water, the effect was beautiful. This mass we attached to the boat, and with great labor and long time, succeeded in getting it up to the ship, the little fishes following behind the seaweed.

it was impossible to lift it on board so we fastened it to the ship's side and came into luncheon after lunch some ropes were arranged to hoist the ladies in a chair over the ship's side and lower them into the boat a process which created much merriment into the boat we put half a dozen of champagne a sight which gave courage to one or two to brave the descent who had not previously ventured on such a feat

"'Then the ladies were pulled round the ship, "'and, when about a mile ahead of her, "'we drank the champagne, and had a regular jellification. "'Returning to show them the seaweed, "'the little fishes looked so good "'that someone thought of a certain net "'wherewith the doctor catches ocean insects, "'porphyrus, cleos, spinulas, etc. "'With this we caught in half an hour, "'amid much screaming laughter and unspeakable excitement, "'no less than two hundred and fifty of them.'

They were about five inches long, funny little blue fishes with wholesome-looking scales. We ate them next day, and they were excellent. Some expected that we should have swollen or suffered some bad effects, but no evil happened to us. Not but what these deep-sea fishes are frequently poisonous, but I believe that scaly fishes are always harmless. We returned by half-past three, after a most enjoyable day.

but as proof of the heat being much greater in the boat, I may mention that one of the party lost the skin from his face and arms, and that we were all much sunburnt, even in so short a time. Yet one man who bathed that day said he had never felt such cold water in his life. We are now January 21, in great hopes of sighting land in three or four days, and are really beginning to feel near the end of our voyage. Now that I can realize this to myself,

it seems as though i had always been on board the ship and was always going to be and as if all my past life had not been mine but had belonged to somebody else or as though someone had taken mine and left me his by mistake i expect however that when the land actually comes in sight we shall have little difficulty in realizing the fact that the voyage has come to a close

the weather has been much warmer since we have been off the coast of australia even though australia is some one hundred north of our present position i have not however yet seen the thermometer higher than since we passed the cape now we are due south of the south point of van diemen's land

and consequently nearer land than we have been for some time. We are making for the Snares, two high islets about sixty miles south of Stewart's Island, the southernmost of the New Zealand group. We sail immediately to the north of them, and then turn up suddenly. The route we have to take passes between the Snares and the Traps, two rather ominous-sounding names, but I believe more terrible in name than in any other particular."

January 22. Yesterday at midday, I was sitting writing in my cabin when I heard the joyful cry of, Land! and rushing on deck, saw the swelling and beautiful outline of the high land in Stewart's Island. We had passed close by the snares in the morning, but the weather was too thick for us to see them, though the birds flocked therefrom in myriads.

we then passed between the traps which the captain saw distinctly one on each side of him from the main topgallant yard land continued in sight till sunset but since then it has disappeared to-day sunday we are speeding up the coast the anchors ready

and to-morrow by early daylight we trust to drop them in the harbour of littleton we have reason from certain newspapers to believe that the mails leave on the twenty third of the month in which case i shall have no time or means to add a single syllable january twenty sixth alas for the vanity of human speculation

after writing the last paragraph the wind fell light then sprung up foul and so we were slowly driven to the east-north-east on monday night it blew hard and we had close-reefed topsails tuesday morning at five it was lovely and the reefs were all shaken out

a light air sprang up and the ship at ten o'clock had come up to her course when suddenly without the smallest warning a gale came down upon us from the southwest like a wall the men were luckily very smart in taking in canvas but at one time the captain thought he should have had to cut away the mizzen-mast

we were reduced literally to bare poles and lay-to under a piece of tarpaulin six times doubled and about two yards square fastened up in the mizzen rigging

All day and night we lay thus, drifting to leeward at three knots an hour. In the twenty-four hours we had drifted sixty miles. Next day the wind moderated, but at twelve we found that we were eighty miles north of the peninsula, and some three degrees east of it, so we set a little sail and commenced fore-reaching slowly on our course. Little and little the wind died, and soon it fell dead calm.

that evening wednesday some twenty albatrosses being congregated like a flock of geese round the ship's stern we succeeded in catching some of them the first we had caught on the voyage we would have let them go again but the sailors think them good eating and beg them of us at the same time prophesying two days foul wind for every albatross taken

It was then dead calm, but a light wind sprang up in the night, and on Thursday we sighted Banks Peninsula. Again the wind fell tantalizingly light, but we kept drawing slowly toward land. In the beautiful sunset sky, crimson and gold, blue, silver, and purple, exquisite and tranquilizing, lay ridge behind ridge, outline behind outline, sunlight behind shadow, shadow behind sunlight, gully and serrated ravine.

hot puffs of wind kept coming from the land and there were several fires burning i got my arm-chair on deck and smoked a quiet pipe with the intensest satisfaction little by little the night drew down and then we ran to the headlands strangely did the waves sound breaking against the rocks of the harbour strangely too looked the outlines of the mountains through the night presently we saw a light ahead from a ship

We drew slowly near, and as we passed, you might have heard a pin drop. "'What ship's that?' said a strange voice. "'The Roman Emperor,' said the captain. "'Are you all well?' "'All well.' Then the captain asked, "'Has the Robert Small arrived?' "'No,' was the answer, nor yet the Burma. "'You may imagine what I felt.' Then a rocket was sent up, and the pilot came up on board."

He gave us a roaring republican speech on the subject of India, China, etc. I rather admired him, especially as he faithfully promised to send us some fresh beefsteaks and potatoes for breakfast.

A northwester sprung up as soon as we had dropped anchor. Had it commenced a little sooner, we should have had to put out again to sea. That night I packed a knapsack to go on shore, but the wind blew so hard that no boat could put off till one o'clock in the day, at which hour I and one or two others landed, and proceeding to the post office, were told there were no letters for us.

i afterwards found mine had gone hundreds of miles away to a namesake a cruel disappointment a few words concerning the precautions advisable for anyone who is about to take a long sea voyage may perhaps be useful first and foremost unless provided with a companion whom he knows well and can trust he must have a cabin to himself

There are many men with whom one can be on excellent terms when not compelled to be perpetually with them, but whom the propinquity of the same cabin would render simply intolerable. It would not even be particularly agreeable to be awakened during a hardly captured wink of sleep by the question, Is it not awful? That, however, would be a minor inconvenience.

no one i am sure will repent paying a few pence more for a single cabin who has seen the inconvenience that others have suffered from having a drunken or disagreeable companion in so confined a space it is not even like a large room he should have books in plenty both light and solid a folding arm-chair is a great comfort and a very cheap one in the hot weather i found mine invaluable and in the bush it will still come in usefully

he should have a little table and common chair these are real luxuries as all who have tried to write or seen others attempt it from a low arm-chair at a washing-stand will readily acknowledge a small disinfecting charcoal filter is very desirable ship's water is often bad and the ship's filter may be old and defective mine has secured me and others during the voyage pure and sweet-tasting water when we could not drink that supplied us by the ship

A bottle or two of raspberry vinegar will be found a luxury when near the line. By the aid of these means and appliances, I have succeeded in making myself exceedingly comfortable. A small chest of drawers would have been preferable to a couple of boxes for my clothes, and I should recommend another to get one. A ten-pound note will suffice for all these things. The bunk should not be too wide when rolls sow in rough weather.

of course it should not be athwart ships if avoidable no one in his right mind will go second class if he can by any hook or crook raise money enough to go first on the whole there are many advantageous results from a sea voyage one's geography improves apace and numberless incidents occur pregnant with interest to a landsman

Moreover, there are sure to be many on board who have traveled far and wide, and one gains a great deal of information about all sorts of races and places. One effect is perhaps pernicious, but this will probably soon wear off on land. It awakens an adventurous spirit and kindles a strong desire to visit almost every spot on the face of the globe. The captain yarns about California and the China Seas,

The Doctor about Valparaiso and the Andes. Another raves about Hawaii and the islands of the Pacific, while a fourth will compare nothing with Japan. The world begins to feel very small when one finds one can get half-rounded in three months, and one mentally determines to visit all these places before coming back again, not to mention a good many more.

i search in my diary in vain to find some pretermited adventure wherewith to give you a thrill or as good mrs b calls it a feel but i can find none the mail is going i will write again by the next

End of section three, which is chapter two.

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CHAPTER III. ASPECT OF PORT LITTLETON. ASCENT OF HILL BEHIND IT. VIEW. CHRISTCHURCH. YANKEISMS. RETURN TO PORT LITTLETON AND SHIP. FORMIUM 10X. VISIT TO A FARM.

Moabons. January 27, 1860. Oh, the heat! The clear, transparent atmosphere and the dust! How shall I describe everything? The little townlet, for I cannot call it a town, nestling beneath the bare hills that we had been looking at so longingly all the morning. The scattered wooden boxes of houses, with ragged roots of scrubby ground between them.

the tussocks of brown grass the huge wide-leaved flax with its now seedy stem sometimes fifteen or sixteen feet high luxuriant and tropical looking the healthy clear-complexioned men shaggy-bearded rowdy-hatted and independent pictures of rude health and strength the stores supplying all heterogeneous commodities

the mountains rising right behind the harbour to a height of over a thousand feet the varied outline of the harbour now smooth and sleeping ah me pleasant sight and fresh to sea stricken eyes the hot air too was very welcome after our long chill

we dined at the table d'hote at the mitre so foreign and yet so english the windows opened to the ground looking upon the lowly harbour hither come more of the shaggy clear-complexioned men with the rowdy hats looked at them with awe and befitting respect

much grieved to find beer sixpence a glass this was indeed serious and was one of the first intimations which we received that we were in a land where money flies like wildfire after dinner i and another commenced the ascent of the hill between port and christchurch we had not gone far before we put our knapsacks on the back of the pack-horse that goes over the hill every day poor pack-horse

it is indeed an awful pull up that hill yet we were so anxious to see what was on the other side of it that we scarcely noticed the fatigue i thought it very beautiful it is volcanic brown and dry large intervals of crumbling soil and then a stiff wiry uncompromising looking tussock of the very hardest grass then perhaps a flax bush or as we should have said a flax plant then more crumbly brown dry soil mixed with fine but dried grass

and then more tussocks volcanic rock everywhere cropping out sometimes red and tolerably soft sometimes black and abominably hard there was a great deal too of a very uncomfortable prickly shrub which they call irishman and which i do not like the look of at all

there were cattle browsing where they could but to my eyes it seemed as though they had but poor times of it so we continued to climb panting and broiling in the afternoon sun and much admiring the lovely view beneath at last we near the top and looked down upon the plain bounded by the distant apennines that run through the middle of the island

near at hand at the foot of the hill we saw a few pretty little box-like houses in trim pretty little gardens stacks of corn and fields a little river with a craft or two lying near a wharf whilst the nearer country was squared into many-coloured fields

but, after all, the view was rather of the long stair description. There was a great extent of country, but very few objects to attract the eye and make it rest any while in any given direction. The mountains wanted outlines. They were not broken up into fine forms like the Canavanshire Mountains, but were rather a long, lofty, blue, even line, like the Jura from Geneva or the Berwyn from Shrewsbury.

the plains too were lovely in colouring but would have been wonderfully improved by an object or two a little nearer than the mountains i must confess that the view though undoubtedly fine rather disappointed me the one in the direction of the harbour was infinitely superior at the bottom of the hill we met the car to christchurch

it halted some time at a little wooden public-house and by and by at another where was a methodist preacher who had just been reaping corn for two pounds an acre he showed me some half-dozen stalks of gigantic size but most of that along the roadside was thin and poor then we reached christchurch on the little river avon it is larger than littleton and more scattered but not so pretty

Here, too, the men are shaggy, clear-complexioned, brown, and healthy-looking, and wear exceedingly rowdy hats. I put up at Mr. Roland Davis's, and as no one during the evening seemed much inclined to talk to me, I listened to the conversation. The only engrossing topics seemed to be sheep, horses, dogs, cattle, English grasses, paddocks, bush, and so forth.

From about seven o'clock in the evening till about twelve at night, I cannot say that I heard much else. These were the exact things I wanted to hear about, and I listened till they had been repeated so many times over that I almost grew tired of the subject and wished the conversation would turn to something else. A few expressions were not familiar to me. When we should say in England, certainly not, it is here, no fear, or don't you believe it.

when they want to answer in the affirmative they say it is so the word h'm too without pronouncing the u is in amusing requisition i perceived that this stood either for assent or doubt or wonder or a general expression of comprehension without compromising the hummer's own opinion and indeed for a great many more things than these in fact if a man did not want to say anything at all he said

it is a very good expression and saves much trouble when its familiar use has been acquired beyond these trifles i noticed no yankeeism and the conversation was english in point of expression i was rather startled at hearing one gentleman ask another whether he meant to wash this year and received the answer no i soon discovered that a person's sheep are himself if his sheep are clean he is clean

he does not wash his sheep before shearing but he washes and most marvellous of all it is not his sheep which lamb but he lambs down himself i have purchased a horse by name doctor i hope he is a homoeopathist he is in color bay distinctly branded p c on the near shoulder

i'm glad the brand is clear for as you well know all horses are alike to me unless there is some violent distinction in their color this horse i brought from to whom mr fitzgerald kindly gave me a letter of introduction i thought i could not do better than buy from a person of known character seeing that my own ignorance is so very great upon the subject

I had to give fifty-five pounds, but as horses are going, that does not seem much out of the way. He is a good river horse and very strong. A horse is an absolute necessity in this settlement. He is your carriage, your coach, and your railway train. On Friday I went to Port Littleton, meeting on the way many of our late fellow passengers.

some despondent some hopeful one or two dinnerless and in the dumps when we first encountered them but dinnered and hopeful when we met them again on our return we chatted with and encouraged them all pointing out the general healthy well-conditioned look of the residents went on board how strangely changed the ship appeared sunny motionless and quiet no noisy children

no slatternly ship-shot women rolling about the decks no slush no washing of dirty linen in dirtier water there was the old mate in a clean shirt at last leaning against the mainmast and smoking his yard of clay the butcher close-shaven and clean the sailors smart and welcoming us with a smile it almost looked like going home

dined in littleton with several of my fellow-passengers who evidently thought it best to be off with the old love before they were on with the new i e to spend all they brought with them before they set about acquiring a new fortune

then we went and helped mr and mrs r to arrange their new house i e r and i scrubbed the floors of the two rooms they had taken with soap scrubbing brushes flannel and water and made them respectably clean and removed his boxes into their proper places saturday

"'wrote again to port and saw my case of sandlery still on board. "'When riding back the haze obscured the snowy range, "'and the scenery reminded me much of Cambridgeshire. "'The distinctive marks which characterize it as not English "'are the occasional tea-palms, "'which have a very tropical appearance, "'and the luxuriance of the formium-10x. "'If you strip a shred of this leaf not thicker than an ordinary piece of string,'

you will find it hard work to break it, if you succeed in doing so at all without cutting your finger.

On the whole, if the road leading from Heathcote Ferry to Christchurch were through an avenue of mulberry trees, and the fields on either side were cultivated with Indian corn and vineyards, and if through these you could catch an occasional glimpse of a distant cathedral of pure white marble, you might well imagine yourself nearing Milan. As it is, the country is a sort of cross between the plains of Lombardy and the fens of North Cambridgeshire.

At night a lot of Nelson and Wellington men came to the club. I was amused at dinner by a certain sailor and others who maintained that the end of the world was likely to arrive shortly. The principal argument appeared to be that there was no more sheep country to be found in Canterbury. This fact is, I fear, only too true. With this single exception the conversation was purely horsey and sheepy.

the fact is the races are approaching and they are the grand annual jubilee of canterbury next morning i rode some miles into the country and visited a farm found the inmates two brothers at dinner cold boiled mutton and bread and cold tea without milk

poured straight from a huge kettle in which it is made every morning seen the staple commodities no potatoes nothing hot they had no servant and no cow the bread which was very white was made by the younger they showed me with some little pleasure some of the improvements they were making and told me what they meant to do and i looked at them with great respect

these men were as good gentlemen in the conventional sense of the word as any with whom we associate in england i dare say de facto much better than many of them they showed me some moa bones which they had ploughed up the moa as you doubtless know was an enormous bird which must have stood some fifteen feet high also some stone maudry battle-axes

They bought this land two years ago, and assured me that, even though they had not touched it, they could get it for cent per cent, upon the price which they then gave. End of chapter 3. Section 5, which is chapter 4, of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, by Samuel Butler. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Gail Timmerman Vaughan.

Chapter 4. Sheep on Terms. Schedule and Explanation. Investment in Sheep Run. Risk of Disease and Loss upon the Subject. Investment in Laying Down Land in English Grass. In Farming. Journey to Oxford. Journey to the Glaciers. Remote Settlers. Literature in the Bush. Blankets and Flies. Ascent of the Rakiya. Camping Out.

glaciers minerals parrots unexplored call burning the flats return february tenth eighteen sixty i must confess to being fairly puzzled to know what to do with the money you have sent me everyone suggests different investments one says buy sheep and put them out on terms i will explain to you what this means i can buy a thousand ewes for one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds

these i should place in the charge of a squatter whose run is not fully stocked and indeed there is hardly a run in the province fully stocked this person would take my sheep for either three four five or more years as we might arrange and would allow me yearly two shillings sixpence per head in lieu of wool this would give me two shillings sixpence as the yearly interest on twenty-five shillings

besides this he would allow me forty per cent increase per annum half male and half female and of these the females would bear increase also as soon as they had attained the age of two years moreover the increase would return me two shillings sixpence per head wool money as soon as they became sheep at the end of the term my sheep would be returned to me as per agreement with no deduction for deaths but the original sheep would be of course so much the older

and some of them being doubtless dead. Sheep of the same age as they would have been will be returned in their place. I will subjoin a schedule showing what 500 ewes will amount to in seven years. We will date from January 1860, and will suppose the yearly increase to be one-half male and one-half female. One year old in January of 1860, 500 ewes. Total 500. One year old in January of 1861.

500 ewes, 100 ewe lambs, 100 weather lambs, total 700. 1 year old in January of 1862. 500 ewes, 100 ewe lambs, 100 weather lambs, 100 ewe hoggets, 100 weather hoggets, total 900. 1 year old in January of 1863. 600 ewes, 120 ewe lambs, 120 weather lambs,

100 ewe hoggets, 100 weather hoggets, 100 weathers. Total 1,140. One year old in January of 1864. 700 ewes, 140 ewe lambs, 140 weather lambs, 120 ewe hoggets, 120 weather hoggets, 200 weathers. Total 1,420.

One year old in January of 1865, 820 ewes, 164 ewe lambs, 164 weather lambs, 140 ewe hoggets, 140 weather hoggets, 320 weathers.

1,748 in total. One year old in January of 1866. 960 ewes. 192 ewe lambs. 192 weather lambs. 164 ewe hoggets. 164 weather hoggets. 460 weathers.

2,132 in total. And in January of 1867, 1,124 ewes, 225 ewe lambs, 225 weather lambs, 192 ewe hoggets, 192 weather hoggets, 624 weathers, for a total of 2,582.

The yearly wool money would be January 1861, 2 shillings 6 pence per head, 62 pounds 10 shillings. January 1862, 87 pounds 10 shillings. January 1863, 112 pounds 10 shillings. January 1864, 142 pounds 10 shillings.

January 1865, £177.10. January 1866, £218.10. January 1867, £266.10.

Total wool money received, 1,067 pounds, 10 shillings. Original capital expended, 625 pounds. I will explain briefly the meaning of this. We will suppose that the ewes have all two teeth to start with. Two teeth indicate one year old. Four teeth, two years. Six teeth, three years. Eight teeth, or full-mouthed, four years.

for the edification of some of my readers as ignorant as i am myself upon ovine matters i may mention that the above teeth are to be looked for in the lower jaw and not the upper the front portion of which is toothless the ewes then being one year old to start with they will be eight years old at the end of seven years

I have only, however, given you so long a term that you may see what would be the result of putting out sheep on terms either for three, four, five, six, or seven years, according as you like. A sheep at eight years old will be in their old age, then live nine or ten years, sometimes more, but an eight-year-old sheep would be what is called a broken-mouthed creature.

that is to say it would have lost some of its teeth from old age and would generally be found to crawl along at the tail end of the mob so that of the two thousand five hundred and eighty-two sheep returned to me five hundred would be very old two hundred would be seven years old two hundred six years old

all these would pass as old sheep and not fetch very much one might get about fifteen shillings a head for the lot all round perhaps however you might sell the two hundred six-year-olds with the younger ones not to overestimate count these seven hundred old sheep as worth nothing at all and consider that i have eighteen hundred sheep in prime order reckoning the lambs as sheep

a weaned lamb being worth nearly as much as a full-grown sheep suppose these sheep have gone down in value from twenty five shillings a head to ten shillings and at the end of my term i realize nine hundred pounds suppose that of the wool money i have only spent sixty two pounds ten shillings per annum i e ten per cent on the original outlay and that i have laid by the remainder of the wool money

i shall have from the wool money a surplus of six hundred and thirty pounds some of which should have been making ten per cent interest for some time that is to say my total receipts for the sheep should be at least one thousand five hundred and thirty pounds say that the capital had only doubled itself in the seven years the investment could not be considered a bad one the above is a bona fide statement of one of the commonest methods of investing money in sheep

i cannot think from all i have heard that sheep will be lower than ten shillings a head still some place above the minimum value as low as six shillings the question arises what is to be done with one's money when the term is out i cannot answer yet surely the colony cannot be quite used up in seven years and one can hardly suppose but that even in that advanced state of the settlement

means will not be found of investing a few thousand pounds to advantage the general recommendation which i receive is to buy the goodwill of a run this cannot be done under about one hundred pounds for every thousand acres thus a run of twenty thousand acres will be worth two thousand pounds

still if a man has sufficient capital to stock it well at once it will pay him even at this price we will suppose the run to carry ten thousand sheep the wool money from these should be two thousand five hundred pounds per annum

If a man can start with two thousand ewes, it will not be long before he finds himself worth ten thousand sheep. Then the sale of surplus stock, which he has not country to feed, should fetch him in fully one thousand pounds per annum, so that, allowing the country to cost two thousand pounds, and the sheep two thousand five hundred pounds, and allowing one thousand pounds for working, plant, buildings, dray, bullocks, and stores, and

and five hundred pounds more for contingencies and expenses of the first two years during which the run will not fully pay its own expenses for a capital of six thousand pounds a man may in a few years find himself possessed of something like a net income of two thousand pounds per annum marvellous as all this sounds i am assured that it is true

On the other hand, there are risks. There is the uncertainty of what will be done in the year 1870 when the runs lapse to the government. The general opinion appears to be that they will be re-let at a greatly advanced rent to the present occupiers. The present rent of land is a farthing per acre for the first and second years, a half penny for the third and

and three farthings for the fourth in every succeeding year. Most of the wastelands in the province are now paying three farthings per acre. There is the danger also of scab. This appears to depend a good deal upon the position of the run in its nature. Thus, a run situated in the plains over which sheep are constantly being driven from the province of Nelson will be in more danger than one on the remoter regions of the backcountry.

in nelson there are few if any laws against carelessness in respect of scab in canterbury the laws are very stringent sheep have to be dipped three months before they quit nelson and inspected and redipped in tobacco water and sulphur on their entry into this province nevertheless a single sheep may remain infected even after this second dipping

the scab may not be apparent but it may break out after having been a month or two in a latent state one sheep will infect others and the whole mob will soon become diseased indeed a mob is considered unsound and compelled to be dipped if even a single scabby sheep have joined it dipping is an expensive process

and if a man's sheep trespass onto his neighbor's run, he has to dip his neighbor's also. Moreover, scab may break out just before or in midwinter, when it is almost impossible on the plains to get firewood sufficient to boil the water and tobacco. Sheep must be dipped whilst the liquid is at a temperature of not less than ninety degrees, and when the severity of the sow-westers renders it nearly certain that a good few sheep will be lost.

lambs too if there be lambs about will be lost wholesale if the sheep be not clean within six months after the information is laid the sum required to be deposited with the government by the owner on the laying of such information is forfeited this sum is heavy though i do not exactly know its amount one dipping would not be ruinous but there is always a chance of some scabby sheep having been left upon the run unmustard and the flock thus becoming infected afresh

so that the whole work may have to be done over again. I perceive a sort of shudder to run through a sheep farmer at the very name of this disease. There are no four letters in the alphabet, which he appears so mortally to detest, and with good reason. Another mode of investment highly spoken of is that of buying land and laying it down in English grass, thus making a permanent estate of it. But I fear this will not do for me.

both because it requires a large expenditure of things in general which as you well know i do not possess and because i should want a greater capital than would be required to start a run more money is sunk and the returns do not appear to be so speedy i cannot give you even a rough estimate of the expenses of such a plan

i will only say that i have seen gentlemen who are doing it and who are confident of success and these men bear the reputation of being shrewd and business-like i cannot doubt therefore that it is both a good and safe investment of money my crude notion concerning it is that it is more permanent and less remunerative

in this i may be mistaken but i am certain it is a thing which might very easily be made a mess of by an inexperienced person whilst many men who have known no more about sheep than i do have made ordinary sheep-farming pay exceedingly well i may perhaps as well say that land laid down in english grass is supposed to carry about five or six sheep to the acre

some say more and some less doubtless somewhat will depend upon the nature of the soil and as yet the experiment can hardly be said to have been fully tried as for farming as we do in england it is universally maintained that it does not pay there seems to be no discrepancy of opinion about this many try it but most men give it up it appears as if it were only bona fide labouring men who can make it answer

the number of farms in the neighbourhood of christchurch seems at first to contradict this statement but i believe the fact to be that these farms are chiefly in the hands of labouring men who had made a little money bought land and cultivated it themselves these men can do well but those who have to buy labour cannot make it answer the difficulty lies in the high rate of wages

February 13. Since my last, I have been paying a visit of a few days at Kayapoy, and made a short trip up to the Harewood Forest, near to which the township of Oxford is situated. Why it should be called Oxford, I do not know. After leaving Rangiora, which is about eight miles from Kayapoy, I followed the Harewood Road till it became a mere track, then a footpath, and then dwindled away to nothing at all. I soon found myself in the middle of the plains.

with nothing but brown tussocks of grass before me and beside me and on either side the day was rather dark and the mountains were obliterated by a haze oh the pleasure of the plains i thought to myself

but upon my word i think old handle would find but little pleasure in these they are in clear weather monotonous and dazzling in cloudy weather monotonous and sad and they have little to recommend them but the facility they afford for travelling and the grass which grows upon them this at least was the impression i derived from my first acquaintance with them as i found myself steering for the extremity of some low downs about six miles distant

I thought these downs would never get nearer. At length I saw a tent-like object dotting itself upon the plain, with eight black mice, as it were, in front of it. This turned out to be a dray, loaded with wool, coming down from the country. It was the first symptom of sheep that I had come upon, for, to my surprise, I saw no sheep upon the plains, neither did I see any in the whole of my little excursion. I am told that this disappoints most newcomers."

they are told that sheep farming is the great business of canterbury but they see no sheep the reason of this is partly because the runs are not yet quarter stocked and partly because the sheep are in mobs

and unless one comes across the whole mob one sees none of them the plains too are so vast that at a very short distance from the track sheep will not be seen when i came up to the dray i found myself on a track reached the foot of the downs and crossed the little river cust a little river brook or stream is always called a creek nothing but the great rivers are called rivers

now clumps of flax and stunted groves of tea-palms and other trees began to break the monotony of the scene then the track ascended the downs on the other side of the stream and afforded me a fine view of the valley of the cust cleared and burned by a recent fire which extended for miles and miles purpling the face of the country up to the horizon

rich flax and grass made the valley look promising but on the hill the ground was stony and barren and shabbily clothed with patches of dry and brown grass surrounded by a square foot or so of hard ground between the tussocks however there was a frequent though scanty undergrowth which might furnish support for sheep though it looked burnt up i may as well here correct an error which i had been under and which you may perhaps have shared with me

native grass cannot be mown after proceeding some few miles further i came to a station where though a perfect stranger and at first at some little distance mistaken for a maori i was most kindly treated and spent a very agreeable evening the people here are very hospitable and i have received kindness already upon several occasions from persons upon whom i had no sort of claim

next day i went to oxford which lies at the foot of the first ranges and is supposed to be a promising place here for the first time i saw the bush it was very beautiful numerous creepers and a luxuriant undergrowth among the trees gave the forest a wholly uneuropean aspect and realized in some degree one's idea of tropical vegetation it was full of birds that sang loudly and sweetly

the trees here are all evergreens and are not considered very good for timber i am told that they mostly have a twist in them and are in other respects not first-rate march twenty fourth at last i have been really in the extreme back country and positively right up to a glacier as soon as i saw the mountains i longed to get on the other side of them and now my wish has been gratified

I left Christchurch in company with a sheep farmer who owns a run-in-the-back country behind the Malvern Hills and who kindly offered to take me with him on a short expedition he was going to make into the remoter valleys of the island in hopes of finding some considerable piece of country which had not yet been applied for. We started February 28th.

and had rather an unpleasant ride of twenty-five miles against a very high north-west wind this wind is very hot very parching and very violent it blew the dust into our eyes so that we could hardly keep them open towards evening however it somewhat moderated as it generally does there was nothing of interest on the track save a dry river-bed through which the waimakariri had once flowed but which it has long quitted

the rest of our journey was entirely over the plains which do not become less monotonous upon a longer acquaintance the mountains however drew slowly nearer and by evening were really rather beautiful the next day we entered the valley of the river selwyn or waikiti as it is generally called and soon found ourselves surrounded by the low volcanic mountains which bear the name of the malvern hills they are very like the banks peninsula

we dined at a station belonging to a son of the bishop's and after dinner made further progress into the interior i have very little to record save that i was disappointed at not finding the wild plants more numerous and more beautiful they are few and decidedly ugly there is one beast of a plant called spear-grass or spaniard which i will tell you more about at another time

you would have laughed to have seen me on that day it was the first on which i had the slightest occasion for any horsemanship you know how bad a horseman i am and can imagine that i let my companion go first in all the little swampy places and small creeks which we came across these were numerous and as doctor always jumped them with what appeared to me a jump about three times greater than was necessary i assure you i heartily wished them somewhere else

however i did my best to conceal my deficiency and before night had become comparatively expert without having betrayed myself to my companion i dare say he knew what was going on well enough but was too good and kind to notice it

at night and by a lovely clear cold moonlight we arrived at our destination heartily glad to hear the dogs barking and to know that we were at our journey's end here we were bona fide beyond the pale of civilization no boarded floors no chairs nor any similar luxuries everything was of the very simplest description

four men inhabited the hut and their life appears a kind of mixture of that of a dog and that of an emperor with a considerable predominance of the latter they have no cook and take it turn and turn about to cook and wash up to one week and to the next they have a good garden and gave us a capital feed of potatoes and peas both fried together an excellent combination

their culinary apparatus and plates cups knives and forks are very limited in number the men are all gentlemen and sons of gentlemen and one of them is a cambridge man who took a high second class a year or two before my time every now and then he leaves his up-country avocations and becomes a great gun at the college in christchurch examining the boys

he then returns to his shepherding cooking bullock-driving etc etc as the case may be i am informed that the having faithfully learned the ingenuous arts has so far mollified his morals that he is an exceedingly humane and judicious bullock-driver he regarded me as a somewhat despicable newcomer at least so i imagined

and when next morning i asked where i should wash he gave a rather french shrug of the shoulders and said the leg i felt the rebuke to be well merited and that with the leg in front of the house i should have been at no loss for the means of performing my ablutions so i retired abashed and cleansed myself therein under his bed i found tennyson's idyls of the king

So you will see that even in these out-of-the-world places, people do care a little for something besides sheep. I was told an amusing story of an Oxford man shepherding down in Otago.

someone came into his hut and taking up a book found it in a strange tongue and inquired what it was the oxonian who was baking at the time answered that it was machiavellian discourses upon the first decade of livy the wonder-strucken visitor laid down the book and took up another which was at any rate written in english

this he found to be bishop butler's analogy putting it down speedily as something not in his line he laid hands upon a third this proved to be the patrum apostolicorum opera on which he saddled his horse and went right away leaving the oxonian to his baking this man must certainly be considered a rare exception new zealand seems far better adapted to develop and maintain in health the physical than the intellectual nature

the fact is people here are busy making money that is the inducement which led them to come in the first instance and they show their sense by devoting their energies to the work yet after all it may be questioned whether the intellect is not as well schooled here as at home though in a very different manner men are as shrewd and sensible as alive to the humorous and as hard-headed

moreover there is much nonsense in the old country from which people here are free there is little conventionalism little formality and much liberality of sentiment very little sectarianism and as a general rule a healthy sensible tone in conversation which i like much but it does not do to speak about john sebastian bach's fugues or pre-raphaelite pictures to return however to the matter in hand

of course everyone at stations like the one we visited washes his own clothes and of course they do not use sheets sheets would require far too much washing red blankets are usual white show fly-blows

the blue-bottle flies blow among blankets that are left lying untidily about but if the same be neatly folded up and present no crumpled creases the flies will leave them alone it is strange too that though flies will blow a dead sheep almost immediately they will not touch one that is living and healthy coupling their good nature in this respect with a love of neatness and hatred of untidiness which they exhibit

i incline to think them decidedly in advance of our english bluebottles which they perfectly resemble in every other respect the english house-fly soon drives them away and after the first year or two a station is seldom much troubled with them so at least i am told by many fly-blown blankets are all very well provided they have been quite dry ever since they were blown the eggs then come to nothing

but if the blankets be damp maggots make their appearance in a few hours and the very suspicion of them is attended with an unpleasant creepy crawly sensation the blankets in which i slept at the station which i have been describing were perfectly innocuous on the morning after i arrived for the first time in my life i saw a sheep killed

it is rather unpleasant but i suppose i shall get as indifferent to it as other people are by and by to show you that the knives of the establishment are numbered i may mention that the same knife killed the sheep and carved the mutton we had for dinner after an early dinner my patron and myself started on our journey and after travelling for some hours over rather rough country the one which appeared to me to be beautiful indeed we came upon a vast river bed with a little river winding about it

this is the harper a tributary of the rakaia and the northern branch of that river we were now going to follow it to its source in the hopes of being led by it to some saddle over which we might cross and come upon entirely new ground the river itself was very low but the huge and wasteful river-bed showed that there were times when its appearance must be entirely different

we got on to the river-bed and following it up for a little way soon found ourselves in a close valley between two very lofty ranges which were plentifully wooded with black birch down to the base there were a few scrubby stony flats covered with irishmen and spear-grass irishmen is the unpleasant thorny shrub which i saw going over the hill from littleton to christchurch on the other side of the stream

they had been entirely left to nature and showed me the difference between country which had been burnt and that which is in its natural condition this difference is very great the fire dries up many swamps at least many disappear after country has been once or twice burnt the water moves more freely unimpeded by the tangled and decaying vegetation which accumulates round it during the lapse of centuries and the sun gets freer access to the ground

cattle do much also they form tracks through swamps and trample down the earth making it harder and firmer sheep do much they convey the seeds of the best grass and tread them into the ground the difference between country that has been fed upon by any livestock even for a single year and that which has never yet been stocked is very noticeable if country is being burnt for the second or third time the fire can be crossed without any difficulty

of course it must be quickly traversed though indeed on thinly grassed land you may take it almost as coolly as you please on one of these flats just on the edge of the bush at the very foot of the mountain we lit a fire as soon as it was dusk and tethered our horses boiled our tea and supped the night was warm and quiet the silence only interrupted by the occasional sharp cry of the wood-hen and the rushing of the river

"'watched the ready glow of the fire, "'the sombre forest, "'and the immediate foreground of our saddles and blankets, "'formed a picture to me entirely new "'and rather impressive.'

probably after another year or two i shall regard camping out as the nuisance which it really is instead of writing about sombre forests and so forth well well that night i thought it very fine and so in good truth it was our saddles were our pillows and we strapped our blankets round us by saddle straps and my companion i believe slept very soundly for my part the scene was altogether too novel to allow me to sleep

i kept looking up and seeing the stars just as i was going off to sleep and that woke me again i had also underestimated the amount of blankets which i should require and it was not long before the romance of the situation wore off and a rather chilly reality occupied its place moreover the flat was stony and i was not knowing enough to have selected a spot which gave a hollow for the hip-bone my great object however was to conceal my condition from my companion

for never was a freshman at Cambridge more anxious to be mistaken for a third-year man than I was anxious to become an old chum, as the colonial dialect calls a settler, thereby proving my new chumship most satisfactorily. Early next morning the birds began to sing beautifully, and the day being thus heralded, I got up, lit the fire, and set the panikins to boil. We then had breakfast and broke camp.

the scenery soon became most glorious for turning round a corner of the river we saw a very fine mountain right in front of us i could at once see that there was a neve near the top of it and was all excitement we were very anxious to know if this was the backbone range of the island and were hopeful that if it was we might find some pass to the other side

the ranges on either hand were as i said before covered with bush and these with the rugged alps in front of us made a magnificent view we went on and soon there came out a much grander mountain a glorious glacier'd fellow and then came more and the mountains closed in and the river dwindled and began leaping from stone to stone and we were shortly in scenery of the true alpine nature very very grand

it wanted however a chalet or two or some sign of human handiwork in the foreground as it was the scene was too savage all the time we kept looking for gold not in a scientific manner but we had a kind of idea that if we looked in the shingly beds of the numerous tributaries to the harper we should surely find either gold or copper or something good so at every shingle bed we came to and every little tributary had a great shingle bed

we lay down and gazed into the pebbles with all our eyes we found plenty of stones with yellow specks in them but none of that rich goodly hue which makes a man certain that what he has found is gold we did not wash any of the gravel for we had no tin dish neither did we know how to wash the specks we found were mica

but i believe i am right in saying that there are large quantities of chromate of iron in the ranges that descend upon the river we brought down some several specimens some of which we believed to be copper but which did not turn out to be so the principal rocks were a hard gray gritty sandstone interwoven with thin streaks of quartz we saw no masses of quartz what we found was intermixed with sandstone and was always in small pieces

the sandstone in like manner was almost always intermingled with quartz besides this sandstone there is a good deal of pink and blue slate the pink chiefly at the top of the range showing a beautiful colour from the river bed in addition to this there was an abundance of rocks of every gradation between sandstone and slate some sandstone almost slate some slate almost sandstone there was also a good deal of pudding stone

but the bulk of the rock was this very hard very flinty sandstone you know i am no geologist i will undertake however to say positively that we did not see one atom of granite

all the mountains that i have yet seen are either volcanic or composed of sandstone and slate when we had reached nearly the base of the mountains we left our horses for we could use them no longer and crossing and recrossing the stream at length turned up through the bush to our right

this bush though very beautiful to look at is composed of nothing but the poorest black birch we had no difficulty in getting through it for it had no undergrowth as the bushes on the front ranges have i should suppose we were here between three and four thousand feet above the level of the sea and you may imagine that at that altitude in a valley surrounded by snowy ranges vegetation would not be very luxuriant

there was sufficient wood however to harbour abundance of parakeets brilliant little glossy green fellows that shot past you now and again with a glisten in the sun and were gone there is a kind of dusky brownish-green parrot too which the scientific call a nestor what they mean by this i know not to the unscientific it is a rather dirty-looking bird with some bright red feathers under its wings

it is very tame sits still to be petted and screams like a real parrot two attended us on our ascent after leaving the bush we threw many stones at them and it was not their fault that they escaped unhurt immediately on emerging from the bush we found all vegetation at an end we were on the moraine of an old glacier and saw nothing in front of us but frightful precipices and glaciers there was a saddle however not above a couple of thousand feet higher

this saddle was covered with snow and as we had neither provisions nor blankets we were obliged to give up going to the top of it we returned with less reluctance from the almost absolute certainty firstly that we were not upon the main range secondly that this saddle would only lead to the waimakariri the next river above the rakaia of these two points my companion was so convinced that we did not greatly regret leaving it unexplored

our object was commercial and not scientific our motive was pounds shillings and pence and where this failed us we lost all excitement and curiosity i fear that we were yet weak enough to have a little hankering after the view from the top of the pass but we treated such puerility with the contempt that it deserved and sat down to rest ourselves at the foot of a small glacier when we descended and reached the horses at nightfall fully satisfied that

beyond the flat beside the river of the harper there was no country to be had in that direction we also felt certain that there was no pass to the west coast up that branch of the rocaya but that the saddle at the head of it would only lead to the waimakariri and reveal the true backbone range further to the west the mountains among which we had been climbing were only offsets from the main chain

this might be shown also by a consideration of the volume of water which supplies the main streams of the rakaia and the waimakariri and comparing it with the insignificant amount which finds its way down the harper the last years that feed the two larger streams must be very extensive

thus showing that the highest range lies still farther to the northward and westward the waimakariri is the next river to the northward of the rakaia that night we camped as before only i was more knowing and slept with my clothes on and found a hollow for my hip-bone by which contrivances i slept like a top next morning at early dawn the scene was most magnificent

The mountains were pale as ghosts, and almost sickening from their death-like whiteness. We gazed at them for a moment or two, and then turned to make a fire, which in the cold frosty morning was not unpleasant. Shortly afterwards we were again en route for the station from which we had started. We burnt the flats as we rode down, and made a smoke which was noticed between fifty and sixty miles off.

i have seen no grander sight than the fire upon a country which has never before been burnt and on which there is a large quantity of irishmen the sun soon loses all brightness and looks as though seen through smoked glass the volumes of smoke are something that must be seen to be appreciated

The flames roar and the grass crackles, and every now and then a glorious lurid flare marks the ignition of an Irishman. His dry thorns blaze fiercely for a minute or two, and then the fire leaves him, charred and blackened forever. A year or two hence a stiff nor'wester will blow him over, and he will lie there and rot and fatten the surrounding grass. Often, however, he shoots out again from the roots, and then he is a considerable nuisance.

on the plains irishman is but a small shrub that hardly rises higher than the tussocks it is only in the back country that it attains any considerable size there its trunk is often as thick as a man's body we got back about an hour after sundown just as heavy rain was coming on and were very glad not to be again camping out for it rained furiously and incessantly the whole night long

Next day we returned to the lower station belonging to my companion, which was replete with European comforts, as the upper was devoid of them. Yet for my part, I could live very comfortably at either. End of chapter four. You're listening to Classic Audiobook Collection. Give us five stars and share with a friend who likes free audiobooks as much as we do. Now back to the show. Section six, which is chapter five.

of a first year in canterbury settlement by samuel butler this librivox recording is in the public domain recording by gail timmerman vaughan chapter v ascent of the waimakariri crossing the river gorge ascent of the rangatata view of the mackenzie plains mackenzie mount cook ascent of the hurunui call leading to the west coast

since my last i have made another expedition into the back country in the hope of finding some little run which had been overlooked i have been unsuccessful as indeed i was likely to be still i had a pleasant excursion and have seen many more glaciers and much finer ones than on my last trip this time i went up the waimakariri by myself

and found that we had been fully right in our supposition that the rakaya saddles would only lead on to that river the main features were precisely similar to those on the rakaya save that the valley was broader the river longer and the mountains very much higher i had to cross the waimakariri just after afresh when the water was thick and i assure you i did not like it

i crossed it first on the plains where it flows between two very high terraces which are from half a mile to a mile apart and of which the most northern must be i should think three hundred feet high it was so steep and so covered with stones toward the base and so broken with strips of shingle that it had fallen over the grass that it took me a full hour to lead my horse from the top to the bottom

i dare say my clumsiness was partly in fault because certainly in switzerland i never saw a horse taken down so nasty a place and so glad was i to be at the bottom of it that i thought comparatively little of the river which was close at hand waiting to be crossed from the top of the terrace i had surveyed it carefully as it lay beneath wandering capriciously in the wasteful shingle-bed and looking like a maze of tangled silver ribbons

i calculated how to cut off one stream after another but i could not shirk the main stream dodge it how i might and when on the level of the river i lost all my landmarks in the labyrinth of streams and determined to cross each just above the first rapid i came to the river was very milky and the stones at the bottom could not be seen except just at the edges i do not know how i got over

i remember going in and thinking that the horse was lifting his legs up and putting them down in the same place again and that the river was flowing backwards in fact i grew dizzy directly but by fixing my eyes on the opposite bank and leaving doctor to manage matters as he chose somehow or other and much to my relief i got to the other side it was really nothing at all i was wet only a little above the ankle

but it is the rapidity of the stream which makes it so unpleasant in fact so positively hard to those who are not used to it on their first few experiences of one of these new zealand rivers people dislike them extremely they then become very callous to them and are as unreasonably foolhardy as they were before timorous then they generally get an escape from drowning or two or else they get drowned in earnest

after one or two escapes their original respect for the rivers returns and for ever after they learn not to play any unnecessary tricks with them not a year passes but what each of them sends one or more to his grave yet as long as they are at their ordinary level and crossed with due care there is no real danger in them whatever i have crossed and recrossed the waimakariri so often in my late trip

that i have ceased to be much afraid of it unless it is high and then i assure you that i am far too nervous to attempt it when i crossed it first i was assured that it was not high but only a little full the waimakariri flows from the back country out into the plains through a very beautiful narrow gorge the channel winds between wooded rocks beneath which the river whirls and frets and eddies most gloriously

above the lower cliffs which descend perpendicularly into the river rise lofty mountains to an elevation of several thousand feet so that the scenery here is truly fine

in the river bed near the gorge there is a good deal of lignite and near the kowai a little tributary which comes in a few miles below the gorge there is an extensive bed of true and valuable coal the back country of the waimakariri is inaccessible by dray so that all the stores and all the wool have to be packed in and packed out on horseback this is a very great drawback and one which is not likely to be soon removed

in winter-time also the pass which leads into it is sometimes entirely obstructed by snow so that the squatters in that part of the country must have a harder time of it than those on the plains they have bush however and that is a very important thing

i shall not give you any full account of what i saw as i went up the waimakariri for were i to do so i should only repeat my last letter suffice it that there is a magnificent mountain chain of truly alpine character at the head of the river and that in parts the scenery is quite equal and grander to that of switzerland but far inferior in beauty how one does long to see some signs of human care in the midst of the loneliness

how one would like too to come occasionally across some little auberge with its vin ordinaire and refreshing fruit these things however are as yet in the far future as for vin ordinaire i do not suppose that except in akaroa the climate will ever admit of grapes ripening in this settlement not that the summer is not warm enough but because the night frosts come early even while the days are exceedingly hot

neither does one see how these back valleys can ever become so densely populated as switzerland they are too rocky and too poor and too much cut up by river beds i saw one saddle low enough to be covered with bush ending a valley of some miles in length through which flowed a small stream with dense bush on either side

i firmly believe that this saddle will lead to the west coast but as the valley was impassable for a horse and as being alone i was afraid to tackle the carrying food and blankets and to leave doctor who might very probably walk off whilst i was on the wrong side of the waimakariri i shirked the investigation i certainly ought to have gone up that valley

I feel as though I had left a stone unturned and must, if all is well at some future time, take someone with me and explore it. I found a few flats up the river, but they were too small and too high up to be worth my while to take. April 1860. I have made another little trip, and this time I have tried the Rangitata. My companion and myself have found a small piece of country, which we have just taken up.

we fear it may be snowy in winter but the expense of taking up country is very small and even should we eventually throw it up the chances are that we may be able to do so with profit we are however sanguine that it may be a very useful little run but you'll have to see it through next winter before we can safely put sheep upon it i have little to tell you concerning the rangitata different from what i have already written about the waimakariri and the harper

the first great interest was of course finding the country which we took up the next was what i confess to the weakness of having enjoyed much more namely a most magnificent view of that most magnificent mountain mount cook it is one of the grandest i have ever seen i will give you a short account of the day we started from a lonely valley which runs down a stream called forest creek it is an ugly barren-looking place enough

a deep valley between two high ranges which are not entirely clear of snow for more than three or four months in the year as its name imports it has some wood though not much for the rangitata back country is very bare of timber we started as i said from the bottom of this valley on a clear frosty morning so frosty that the tea-leaves in our pannikins were frozen and our outer blanket crisped with frozen dew

we went up a little gorge as narrow as a street in genoa with huge black and dripping precipices overhanging it so as almost to shut out the light of heaven i never saw so curious a place in my life it soon opened out and we followed up a little stream which flowed through it this was no easy work the scrub was very dense and the rocks huge

the spaniard piked us until the bane and i assure you that we were hard set to make any headway at all at last we came to a waterfall the only one worthy of the name that i have seen yet this struck us up as they say here concerning any difficulty

we managed however to slew it as they no less elegantly say concerning the surmounting of an obstacle after five hours of the most toilsome climbing we found the vegetation become scanty and soon got on to the loose shingle which was near the top of the range in seven hours from the time we started we were on the top hence we had hoped to discover some entirely new country

but were disappointed for we only saw the mackenzie plains lying stretched out for miles away to the southward these plains are so called after a notorious shepherd who discovered them some few years since keeping his knowledge to himself he used to steal his master's sheep and drive them quietly into his unsuspected hiding-place this he did so cleverly that he was not detected until he had stolen many hundred much obscurity hangs over his proceedings

it is supposed that he made one successful trip down to otago through this country and sold a good many of the sheep he had stolen he is a man of great physical strength and can be no common character many stories are told about him and his fame will be lasting he was taken and escaped more than once and finally was pardoned by the governor on condition of his leaving new zealand it was a rather strange proceeding and i doubt how fair to the country which he may have chosen to honour with his presence

for i should suppose there is hardly a more daring and dangerous rascal going however his boldness and skill have won him sympathy and admiration so that i believe the pardon was rather a popular act than otherwise to return there we lay on the shingle bed at the top of the range in the broiling noonday for even at that altitude it was very hot and there was no cloud in the sky and very little breeze

I saw that if we wanted a complete view, we must climb to the top of a peak which, though only a few hundred feet higher than where we were lying, nevertheless hid a great deal from us. I accordingly began the ascent, having arranged with my companion that if there was country to be seen he should be called, if not he should be allowed to take it easy. Well, I saw snowy peak after snowy peak come in view as the summit in front of me narrowed.

but no mountains were visible higher or grander than what i had already seen suddenly as my eyes got on a level with the top so that i could see over i was struck almost breathless by the wonderful mountain that burst on my sight the effect was startling it rose towering in a massy parallelogram disclosed from top to bottom in a cloudless sky far above all the others

It was exactly opposite to me and about the nearest in the whole range, so you may imagine that it was indeed a splendid spectacle. It has been calculated by the Admiralty people at 13,200 feet, but Mr. Host, a gentleman of high scientific attainments in the employ of the government as geological surveyor, says that it is considerably higher. For my part, I can well believe it.

mont blanc himself is not so grand in shape and does not look so imposing indeed i am not sure that mount cook is not the finest in outline of all the snowy mountains that i have ever seen it is not visible from many places on the eastern side of the island and the front ranges are so lofty that they hide it

it can be seen from the tops of banks peninsula and for a few hundred yards somewhere near timaru and over a good deal of the mackenzie country but nowhere else on the eastern side of this settlement unless from a great height it is however well worth any amount of climbing to see no one can mistake it if a person says he thinks he has seen mount cook you may be quite sure that he has not seen it

the moment it comes into sight the exclamation is that is mount cook not that must be mount cook there is no possibility of mistake there is a glorious field for the members of the alpine club here mount cook awaits them

and he who first scales it will be crowned with undying laurels for my part although it is hazardous to say this of any mountain i do not think that any human being will ever reach its top i am forgetting myself into admiring a mountain which is of no use for sheep this is wrong a mountain here is only beautiful if it has good grass on it scenery is not scenery it is country sub

if it is good for sheep it is beautiful magnificent and all the rest of it if not it is not worth looking at i am cultivating this tone of mind with considerable success but you must pardon me for an occasional outbreak of the old adam of course i called my companion up and he agreed with me that he had never seen anything so wonderful we got down very much tired a little after dark

we had had a very fatiguing day but it was amply repaid that night it froze pretty sharply and our blankets were again stiff may eighteen sixty not content with the little piece of country we found recently we have since been up the huronui to its source and seen the water flowing down the tarama cow or tether my cow as the europeans call it we did no good and turned back partly owing to bad weather and partly from the impossibility of proceeding further with horses

Indeed, our pack horse had rolled over more than once, frightening us much, but fortunately escaping unhurt. The season, too, is getting too late for any long excursion. The Hurunui is not a snow river. The great range becomes much lower here, and the saddle of the Hurunui can hardly be more than 3,000 feet above the level of the sea. Vegetation is luxuriant, most abominably and unpleasantly luxuriant, for there is no getting through it at the very top.

the reason of this is that the nor'westers coming heavily charged with warm moisture deposited on the western side of the great range and the saddles of course get some of the benefit as we were going up the river we could see the gap at the end of it covered with dense clouds which were coming from the northwest and which just looked over the saddle and then ended there are some beautiful lakes on the horonui surrounded by lofty wooded mountains

the few maoris that inhabit this settlement travel to the west coast by way of this river they always go on foot and we saw several traces of their encampments little mimis as they are called a few light sticks thrown together and covered with grass affording a sort of half-and-half shelter for a single individual how comfortable chapter five section seven which is chapter six of a first year in canterbury settlement

by Samuel Butler. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Gail Timmerman Vaughan. Chapter 6. Hut. Cadets. Openings for emigrants without capital, for those who bring money. Drunkenness. Introductions. The Rakaia. Valley leading to the Rangitata. Snowgrass and Spaniard. Solitude. Rain and flood. Cat. Irishman.

discomforts of hut gradual improvement value of cat i am now going to put up a v-hut on the country that i took up on the rangitata meaning to hibernate there in order to see what the place is like i shall also build a more permanent hut there for i must have someone with me and we may as well be doing something as nothing i have hopes of being able to purchase some good country in the immediate vicinity

there is a peace on which i have my eye and which adjoins that i have already there can be i imagine no doubt that this is excellent sheep country still i should like to see it in winter june eighteen sixty the vee hut is a fait accompli if so small an undertaking can be spoken of in so dignified a manner it consists of a small roof set upon the ground

it is a hut all roof and no walls i was very clumsy and so in good truth was my man still at last by dint of perseverance we made it wind and water tight it was a job that should have taken us about a couple of days to have done in first-rate style as it was i'm not going to tell you how long it did take

i must certainly send the man to the right about but the difficulty is to get another for the aforesaid hut is five-and-twenty miles at the very least from any human habitation so that you may imagine men do not abound i had two cadets with me and must explain that a cadet means a young fellow who has lately come out and who wants to see a little of up-country life

he is neither paid nor pays he receives his food and lodging gratis but works or is supposed to work in order to learn the two who accompanied me both left me in a very short time i have nothing to say against either of them both did their best and i am much obliged to them for what they did but a very few days experience showed me that the system is a bad one for all the parties concerned in it

the cadet soon gets tired of working for nothing and as he is not paid it is difficult to come down upon him if he is good for anything he is worthy of pay as well as board and lodging if not worth more than these last he is simply a nuisance for he sets a bad example which cannot be checked otherwise than by dismissal and it is not an easy or pleasant matter to dismiss one whose relation is rather that of your friend than of your servant

the position is a false one and the blame of its failure lies with the person who takes the cadet for either he is getting an advantage without giving its due equivalent or he is keeping a useless man about his place to the equal detriment both of the man and of himself it may be said that the advantage offered to the cadet in allowing him an insight into colonial life is a bona fide payment for what work he may do

this is not the case for where labour is so very valuable a good man is in such high demand that he may find well-paid employment directly when a man takes a cadet's billet it is a tolerably sure symptom that he means half and half work in which case he is worse than useless there is however another alternative which is a very different matter

let a man pay not only for his board and lodging but a good premium likewise for the insight that he obtains into up-country life then he is at liberty to work or not as he chooses the station hands cannot look down upon him as they do upon the other cadet neither if he chooses to do nothing which is far less likely if he is on this footing than on the other is his example pernicious

it is well understood that he pays for the privilege of idleness and has a perfect right to use it if he sees fit i need not say that this last arrangement is only calculated for those who come out with money those who have none should look out for the first employment which they feel themselves calculated for and go in for it at once what is the opening here for young men of good birth and breeding who have nothing but health and strength and energy for their capital

I would answer nothing very brilliant. Still, they may be pretty sure of getting a shepherd's billet somewhere upcountry, if they are known to be trustworthy.

if they sustain this character they will soon make friends and find no great difficulty after the lapse of a year or two in getting an overseer's place with from one hundred to two hundred pounds a year in their board and lodging they will find plenty of good investments for the small sums which they may be able to lay by and if they are bona fide smart men some situation is quite sure to turn up by-and-by in which they may better themselves

in fact they are quite sure to do well in time but time is necessary here as well as in other places true less time may do here and true also that there are more openings but it may be questioned whether good safe ready-witted men will not fetch nearly as high a price in england as in any part of the world so that if a young and friendless lad lands here and makes his way and does well the chances are that he would have done well also had he remained at home

if he has money the case is entirely changed he can invest it far more profitably here than in england any merchant will give him ten per cent for it money is not to be had for less go where you go for it

and if obtained from a merchant his two point five per cent commission repeated at intervals of six months makes a nominal ten per cent into fifteen i mention this to show you that if it pays people to give this exorbitant rate of interest and the current rate must be one that will pay the borrower the means of increasing capital in this settlement are great

for young men however sons of gentlemen and gentlemen themselves sheep or cattle are the most obvious and best investment they can buy and put out upon terms as i have already described they can also buy land and let it with a purchasing clause by which they can make first-rate interest thus twenty acres cost forty pounds this they can let for five years at five shillings an acre

the lessee being allowed to purchase the land at five pounds an acre in five years time which the chances are he will be both able and willing to do beyond sheep cattle and land there are very few if any investments here for gentlemen who come out with little practical experience in any business or profession but others would turn up with time what i have written above refers to good men there are many such who find the conventionalities of english life distasteful to them

who want to breathe a freer atmosphere and yet have no unsteadiness of character or purpose to prevent them from doing well men whose health and strength and good sense are more fully developed than delicately organized who find head-work irksome and distressing but who would be ready to do a good hard day's work at some physical laborious employment if they are earnest they are certain to do well if not they had better be idle at home than here idle men in this country are pretty sure to take to drinking

whether men are poor or rich there seems to be far greater tendency towards drink here than at home and sheep farmers as soon as they get things pretty straight and can afford to leave off working themselves are apt to turn drunkards unless they have a taste for intellectual employments they find time hangs heavy on their hands and unknown almost to themselves fall into the practice of drinking till it becomes a habit

i am no teetotaller and do not want to moralize unnecessarily still it is impossible after a few months residence in the settlement not to be struck with the facts i have written above i should be lost to advise any gentleman to come out here unless he have either money and an average share of good sense or else a large amount of proper self-respect and strength of purpose

if a young man goes out to friends on an arrangement definitely settled before he leaves england he is at any rate certain of employment and of a home upon his landing here but if he lands friendless or simply the bearer of a few letters of introduction obtained from second or third hand

because his cousin knew somebody who had a friend who had married a lady whose nephew was somewhere in new zealand he has no very enviable lookout upon his arrival a short time after i got up to the rangatata i had occasion to go down again to christchurch and stayed there one day on my return with a companion we were delayed two days at the rocaya a very heavy fresh had come down so as to render the river impassable even in the punt

the hunt can only work upon one stream but in a very heavy fresh the streams are very numerous and almost all of them impassable for a horse without swimming him which in such a river as the rocaya is very dangerous work sometimes perhaps half a dozen times in a year the river is what is called bank and bank that is to say one mass of water from one side to the other it is frightfully rapid and as thick as pea-soup

the river bed is not far short of a mile in breadth so you may judge of the immense volume of water that comes down it at these times it is seldom more than three days impassable in the punt on the third day they commenced crossing in the punt

behind which we swam our horses since then the clouds had hung inceasingly upon the mountain ranges and though much of what had fallen would on the back ranges be in all probability snow we could not doubt but that the rangitata would afford us some trouble nor were we even certain about the ashburton a river which though partly glacier-fed is generally easily crossed anywhere

we found the ashburton high but lower than it had been in one or two of the eleven crossing places between our afternoon and evening resting places we were wet up to the saddle flaps still we were able to proceed without any real difficulty that night it snowed and the next morning we started amid a heavy rain being anxious if possible to make my own place that night

soon after we started the rain ceased and the clouds slowly uplifted themselves from the mountain sides we were riding through the valley that leads from the ashburton to the upper valley of the rangatata and kept on the right side of it it is a long open valley the bottom of which consists of a large swamp from which rise terrace after terrace up the mountains on either side the country is as it were crumpled up in an extraordinary manner

so that it is full of small ponds or lagoons sometimes dry sometimes merely swampy now as full of water as they could be the number of these is great they do not however attract the eye being hidden by the hillocks with which each is more or less surrounded they vary in extent from a few square feet or yards to perhaps an acre or two while one or two attain the dimensions of a considerable lake

there is no timber in this valley and accordingly the scenery though on a large scale is neither impressive nor pleasing the mountains are swelling hummocks grassed to the summit and though steeply declivitous entirely destitute of precipice truly it is rather a dismal place on a dark day and somewhat like the world's end which the young prince travelled to in the story of cherry or the frog bride the grass is coarse and cold-looking

great tufts of what is called snow-grass and spaniard the first of these grows in a clump sometimes five or six feet in diameter and four or five feet high sheep and cattle pick at it when they are hungry but seldom touch it while they can get anything else the seed is like that of oats it is an unhappy-looking grass if grass it be spaniard which i have mentioned before is simply detestable it has a strong smell half turpentine half celery

It is sometimes called speargrass and grows to the size of a molehill.

all over the back country everywhere, as thick as molehills in a very molehilly field at home. Its blossoms, which are green, insignificant and ugly, are attached to a high spike, bristling with spears, pointed every way and very acutely. Each leaf terminates in a strong spear, and so firm is it that if you come within its reach, no amount of clothing about the legs will prevent you from feeling its effects. I have had my legs marked all over by it,

horses hate the spaniard and no wonder in the back country when travelling without a track it is impossible to keep your horse from yawning about this way and that to dodge it and if he encounters three or four of them growing together he will jump over them to do anything rather than walk through a kind of white wax which burns with very great brilliancy exudes from the leaf

there are two ways in which spaniard may be converted to some little use the first is in kindling a fire to burn a run a dead flower-stalk serves as a torch and you can touch tussock after tussock literally lighting them at right angles to the wind the second is purely prospective it will be very valuable for planting on the tops of walls to secure instead of broken bottles

not a cat would attempt a wall so defended snow-grass tussock grass spaniard rushes swamps lagoons terraces meaningless rises and indentations of the ground and two great brown grassy mountains on either side are the principal and uninteresting objects in the valley through which we were riding i despair of giving you an impression of the real thing

It is so hard for an Englishman to divest himself not only of hedges and ditches and cutting in bridges, but of all signs of human existence whatsoever, that unless you are to travel in a similar country yourself, you would never understand it. After about ten miles we turned a corner and looked down upon the upper valley of the Rangitata, very grand, very gloomy, and very desolate.

the river-bed about a mile and a half broad was now conveying a very large amount of water to the sea some think that the source of the river lies many miles higher and that it works its way yet far back into the mountains but as we looked up the river-bed we saw two large and gloomy gorges at the end of which of each were huge glaciers distinctly visible to the naked eye but through the telescope resolving into tumbled masses of blue ice

exact counterparts of the swiss and italian glaciers these are quite sufficient to account for the volume of the water in the rangitata without going any farther the river had been high for many days so high that a party of men who were taking a dray over to a run which was then being just started on the other side and which is now mine had been detained camping out for ten days and were delayed for ten days more before the dray could cross

We spent a few minutes with these men, among whom was a youth whom I had brought away from home with me when I was starting down for Christchurch, in order that he might get some beef from Pease and take it back again. The river had come down the evening on which we had crossed it, and so he had been unable to get the beef and himself home again. We all wanted to get back for home, though home be only a V-hut is worth pushing for. A little thing will induce a man to leave it,

but if he is near his journey's end he will go through most places to reach it so we determined on going on and after great difficulty in many turnings up one stream and down another we succeeded in getting safely over we were wet well over the knee but just avoided swimming

i got into one quicksand of which the river is full and had to jump off my mare but this was quite near the bank i had a cat on the pommel of my saddle for the rats used to come and take the meat off our very plates by our side she got a sousing when the mare was in the quicksand but i heard her purring not long after and was comforted

of course she was in a bag i do not know how it is but men here are much fonder of cats than they are at home after we had crossed the river there were many troublesome creeks yet to go through sluggish and swampy with bad places for getting in and out these however were as nothing in comparison with the river itself which we all had feared more than we cared to say and which in good truth was not altogether unworthy of fear

by and by we turned up the shinkley river-bed which leads to the spot on which my hut is built the river is called forest creek and though usually nothing but a large brook it was now high and unpleasant from its rapidity and the large boulders over which it flows

little by little night and heavy rain came on and right glad were we when we saw the twinkling light on the terrace where the hut was and were thus assured that the irishman who had been left alone and without meat for the last ten days was still in the land of the living two or three coo-ees soon made him aware that we were coming and i believe he was almost as pleased to see us as robinson crusoe was to see the spaniard who brought over the cannibals to be killed and eaten

what the old irishman had been about during our absence i cannot say he could not have spent much time in eating for there was wonderfully little besides flour tea and sugar for him to eat there was no grog upon the establishment so he could not have been drinking he had distinctly seen my ghost two nights before

I had been coherently drowned in the Rangitata, and when he heard us coo-weeing he was almost certain that it was the ghost again. I had left the V-hut warm and comfortable, and on my return found it very different. I fear that we had not put enough thatch upon it, and the ten days' rain had proved too much for it. It was now neither airtight nor watertight. The floor, or rather the ground, was soaked and soppy with mud,

the nice warm snow-grass on which i had lain so comfortably the night before i left was muddy and wet altogether there being no fire inside the place was as revolting looking and a fair as one would wish to see

coming cold and wet off a journey. We had hoped for better things. There was nothing for it but to make the best of it, so we had tea, and fried some of the beef, the smell of which was anything but agreeable, for it had been lying ten days on the ground on the other side of the Rangitata, and was, to say the least, somewhat high. And then we sat in our greatcoats on four stones round the fire, and smoked. Then I baked, and one of the cadets washed up,

and then we arranged our blankets as best we could and were soon asleep alike unconscious of the dripping rain which came through the roof of the hut and of the cold raw atmosphere which was insinuating itself through the numerous crevices of the thatch i had brought up a tin kettle with me this was a great comfort and acquisition for before we had nothing larger than pint pannikins to fetch up water from the creek

This was all very well by daylight, but in the dark the hundred yards from the hut to the creek were no easy travelling, with a pannikin in each hand.

the ground was very stony and covered with burnt irishman scrub against which the irishman being black and charred and consequently invisible in the dark i was continually stumbling and spilling half the water there was a terrace too so that we seldom arrived with much more than half a pannikin and the kettle was an immense step in advance the irishman called it very beneficial as he called everything that pleased him he was a great character

he used to destroy his food not eat it if i asked him to have any more bread or meat he would say with perfect seriousness that he had destroyed enough this time he had many other quaint expressions of this sort but they did not serve to make the hot water tight and i was half regretfully obliged to send him away a short time afterwards

the winter's experience satisfied me that the country that h and i had found would not do for sheep unless worked in connection with more that was clear of snow throughout the year as soon therefore as i was convinced that the adjacent country was safe i bought it and settled upon it in good earnest abandoning the vee hut i did so with some regret for we had good fare enough in it and i rather liked it

we had only stones for seats but we made splendid fires and got fresh and clean snow-grass to lie on and dried the floor with wood ashes then we confined the snow-grass within certain limits by means of a couple of poles laid upon the ground and fixed into their places with pegs then we put up several slings to hang our saddle-bags tea sugar salt bundles etc then we made a horse for the saddles

four riding-saddles and a pack-saddle and underneath this went our tools at one end and our culinary utensils limited but very effective at the other having made it neat we kept it so and of a night it wore an aspect of comfort quite domestic even to the cat which would come in through a hole left in the thatched door for her especial benefit and per a regular hurricane

We blessed her both by day and by night, for we saw no rats after she came, and great excitement prevailed when, three weeks after her arrival, she added a litter of kittens to our establishment. End of chapter six. Carla only has the best tech. Can't connect to network. But she didn't have the best internet. So she got Cox Multigig Spades to power all her...

Now, all her tech is connected. Give your tech the speed it deserves. Get our top-tier internet with Cox Multigig. Two gig download speeds, individual speeds vary. See cox.com for details. Section 8, which is Chapter 7 of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement by Samuel Butler. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Gail Timmerman Vaughan.

Chapter 7. LOADING DREY. BULLOCKS. WANT OF ROADS. BANKS PENINTULA. FRONT AND BACK RANGES OF MOUNTAINS. RIVER BEDS. ORIGIN OF THE PLAINS. TERRASSES. TUTU. FORD'S. FLOODS. LOST BULLOCKS. SCARCITY OF FEATURES ON THE PLAINS. TERRASSES. CROSSING THE ASHBURTON. CHANGE OF WEATHER. ROOFLESS HUT. BRANDY KEG.

i completed the load of my dray on a tuesday afternoon in the early part of october eighteen sixty and determined on making main's accommodation house that night of the contents of the dray i need hardly speak though perhaps a full enumeration of them might afford no bad index to the requirements of a station they are more numerous than might at first be supposed rigidly useful and rarely if ever ornamental

flour tea sugar tools household utensils few and rough a plough and harrows doors windows oats and potatoes for seed and all the usual denizens of a kitchen garden these with a few private effects formed the main bulk of the contents amounting to about a ton and a half in weight i had only six bullocks but these were good ones and worth many a team of eight

A team of eight will draw from two to three tons along a pretty good road. Bullocks are very scarce here. None are to be got under 20 pounds, while 30 pounds is no unusual price for a good harness bullock. They can do much more in harness than in bows and yokes, but the expense of harness and the constant disorder into which it gets render it cheaper to use more bullocks in the simpler tackle.

Each bullock has its name and knows it as well as a dog does his. There is generally a tinge of the comic in the names given to them. Many stations have a small mob of cattle from whence to draw their working bullocks, so that a few more or a few less makes little or no difference. They are not fed with corn at accommodation houses, as horses are. When their work is done, they are turned out to feed till dark or till eight or nine o'clock.

a bullock fills himself if on pretty good feed in about three or three and a half hours he then lies down till the very early morning at which time the chances are ten to one that awakening refreshed and strengthened he commences to stray back along the way he came or in some other direction

accordingly it is a common custom about eight or nine o'clock to yard one's team and turn them out with the first daylight for another three or four hours feed yarding bullocks is however a bad plan they do their day's work of from fifteen to twenty miles or sometimes more at one spell and travel at the rate of from two and a half to three miles an hour the road from chrestridge to mainz is metalled for about four and a half miles

there are fences and fields on both sides either laid down in english grass or sown with grain the fences are chiefly low ditch and bank planted with gorse rarely with quick the scarcity of which detracts from the resemblance to english scenery which would otherwise prevail

the copy however is slatternly compared with the original the scarcity of timber the high price of labour and the pressing urgency of more important claims upon the time of the small agriculturalist prevent him for the most part from attaining the spick-and-span neatness of an english homestead many makeshifts are necessary a broken rail or gate is mended with a piece of flax so occasionally are the roads

i have seen the government roads themselves being repaired with no other material than stiff tussocks of grass flax and rushes this is bad but to a certain extent necessary where there is so much to be done and so few hands and so little money with which to do it after getting off the completed portion of the road the track commences along the plains unassisted by the hand of man before one and behind one and on either hand

waves the yellow tussock upon a stony plain, interminably monotonous. On the left, as you go southward, lies Banks Peninsula, a system of submarine volcanoes culminating in a flattened dome, little more than 3,000 feet high. Cook called it Banks Island, either because it was an island in his day or because no one, to look at it, would imagine that it was anything else.

most probably the latter is the true reason though as the land is being raised by earthquakes it is just possible that the peninsula may have been an island in cook's day for the foot of the peninsula is very little above sea-level it is indeed true that the harbour of wellington has been raised some feet since the foundation of the settlement but the opinion here is general that it must have been many centuries since the peninsula was an island

on the right at a considerable distance rises the long range of mountains which the inhabitants of christchurch suppose to be the backbone of the island and which they call the snowy range the real axis of the island however lies much farther back and between it and the range now in sight the land has no rest but is continually steep up and steep down as if nature had determined to try how much mountain she could place upon a given space

she had however still some regard for utility for the mountains are rarely precipitous very steep often rocky and shingly when they have attained a great elevation but seldom if ever until in immediate proximity to the west coast range abrupt like the descent from the top of snowdon towards capocurig or the precipices of clogwen durardu

the great range is truly alpine and the front range occasionally reaches an altitude of nearly seven thousand feet the result of this absence of precipice is that there are no waterfalls in the front range and few in the back and these few very insignificant as regards the volume of water in switzerland one has the falls of the rhine of the aar the giesbach the staubach and cataracts great and small innumerable here there is nothing of the kind

quite as many large rivers but few waterfalls to make up for which the rivers run with an almost incredible fall mount peel is twenty-five miles from the sea and the river bed of the rangatata underneath that mountain is eight hundred feet above the sea-line the river running in a straight course the winding about in its wasteful river bed to all appearance it is running through a level plain

of the remarkable gorges through which each river finds its way out of the mountains into the plains i must speak when i take my dray through the gorge of the ashburton though this is the least remarkable of the monts in the mean time i must return to the dray on its way to mainz although i see another digression awaiting me as soon as i have got it two miles ahead of its present position

it is tedious work keeping constant company with the bullocks they travel so slowly let us linger behind and sun ourselves upon a tussock or a flax-bush and let them travel on until we catch them up again they are now going down into an old river-bed formerly tenanted by the waimakariri which then flowed into lake elizmere ten or a dozen miles south of christchurch and which now enters the sea at kaiapoi twelve miles north of it

besides this old channel it has others which it discarded with fickle caprice for the one in which it happens to be flowing at present and which there appears some reason for thinking it is soon going to tire of if it eats about a hundred yards more of its gravelly bank in one place the river will find an old bed several feet lower than its present this bed will conduct it into christchurch

government had put up a wooden defence at a cost of something like two thousand pounds but there was no getting any firm starting-ground and a few freshes carried embankment piles and all away and ate a large slice off the bank into the bargain there is nothing for it but to let the river have its own way every fresh changes every ford and to a certain extent alters every channel after any fresh the river may shift its course directly on to the opposite side of its bed

and leave christchurch in undisturbed security for centuries or again any fresh may render such a shift in the highest degree improbable and sooner or later seal the fate of our metropolis at present no one troubles his head much about it although a few years ago there was a regular panic upon the subject

these old river channels or at any rate channels where portions of the rivers have at one time come down are everywhere about the plains but the nearer you get to a river the more you see of them on either side of the rakaia after it has got clear of the gorge you find channel after channel now completely grassed over for some miles betraying the action of river water as plainly as possible

the rivers after leaving their several gorges lie as it were on the highest part of a huge fan-like delta which radiates from the gorge down to the sea the plains are almost entirely for many miles on either side of the rivers composed of nothing but stones all betraying the action of water

These stones are so closely packed that at times one wonders how the tussocks and fine sweet undergrowth can force their way up through them. And even where the ground is free from stones at the surface, I am sure that a little distance below, stones would be found packed in the same way. One cannot take one's horse out of a walk in many parts of the plains when off the track. I mean, one cannot without doing violence to old world notions concerning horses' feet.

i said the rivers lie on the highest part of the delta not always the highest but seldom the lowest there is reason to believe that in the course of centuries they oscillate from side to side for instance four miles north of the rakaia there is a terrace some twelve or fourteen feet high the water in the river is nine feet above the top of this terrace to the eye of the casual observer there is no perceptible difference between the levels

still the difference exists and has been measured i am no geologist myself but have been informed of this by one who is in the government survey office and upon whose authority i can rely the general opinion is that the rakaia is now tending rather to the northern side a fresh comes down upon a crumbling bank of sand and loose shingle with incredible force tearing it away hour by hour in ravenous binds

in fording the river one crosses now a considerable stream on the northern side where four months ago there was hardly any while after one is done with the water part of the story there remains a large extent of river bed in the process of gradually being covered with cabbage-trees flax tussock irishmen and other plants and evergreens

yet after one is clear of the blankets so to speak of the river-bed the traces of the river are no fresher on the southern side than on the northern side even if so fresh plains at first sight would appear to have been brought down by the rivers from the mountains the stones upon them are all water-worn and they are traversed by a great number of old water-courses all tending more or less from the mountains to the sea

how then are we to account for the deep and very wide channels cut by the rivers for channels it may be more than a mile broad and flanked on either side by steep terraces which near the mountains are several feet high if the rivers cut these terraces and made these deep channels the plains must have been there already for the rivers to cut them it must be remembered that i write without any scientific knowledge

how again are we to account for the repetition of the phenomenon exhibited by the larger rivers in every tributary small or great from the glaciers to the sea they are all as like as p to p in principle though of course varying in detail

yet every trifling water-course as it emerges from mountainous to level ground presents the same phenomenon namely a large gully far too large for the water which could ever have come down it gradually widening out and then disappearing

the general opinion here among the reputed cognoscenti is that all these gullies were formed in the process of the gradual upheaval of the island from the sea and that the plains were originally sea-bottoms slowly raised and still slowly raising themselves doubtless the rivers brought the stones down but they were deposited in the sea

the terraces which are so abundant all over the back country and which rise one behind another to the number it may be of twenty or thirty with the most unpicturesque regularity on my run there are a full twenty they are supposed to be elevated sea-beaches they are to be seen even as high as four or five thousand feet above the level of the sea

and I doubt not that a geologist might find traces of them higher still. Therefore, though when first looking at the plains and river bed flats, which are so abundant in the back country, one might be inclined to think that no other agent than the rivers themselves have been at work, and though when one sees the delta below and the empty gully above, like a minute glass after the egg has been boiled, the top glass empty of the sand and the bottom glass full of it,

one is tempted to rest satisfied yet when we look closer we shall find that more is wanted in order to account for the phenomena exhibited and the geologists of the island supply that more by means of upheaval i pay the tribute of a humble salaam to science and return to my subject we crossed the old river-bed of the waimakariri and crawled slowly on to mainz through the descending twilight

one sees main's about six miles off and it appears to be about six hours before one reaches it a little hump for the house and a longer hump for the stables the tutu not having yet begun to spring i yarded my bullocks at main's this demands explanation tutu is a plant which dies away in the winter and shoots up anew from the old roots in the spring growing from six inches to two or three feet in height

sometimes even to five or six it is of a rich green colour and presents at a little distance something the appearance of myrtle on its first coming above the ground it resembles asparagus i have seen three varieties of it though i am not sure whether two of them may not be the same varied somewhat by soil and position the third grows only in high situations and is unknown upon the plains

it has leaves very minutely subdivided and looks like a fern but the blossom and seed are nearly identical with the other varieties the peculiar property of the plant is that though highly nutritious for both sheep and cattle when eaten upon a tolerably full stomach it is very fatal upon an empty one sheep and cattle eat it to any extent with perfect safety when running loose on their pasture because they are then always pretty full

but take the same sheep and yard them for some few hours or drive them so that they cannot feed then turn them into tutu and the result is that they are immediately attacked with apoplectic symptoms and die unless promptly bled nor does bleeding by any means always save them

the worst of it is that when empty they are keenest after it and nab it in spite of one's most frantic appeals both verbal and flagellatory some say that tutu acts like cover and blows out the stomach so that death ensues the seed stones however contained in the dark poppy berry are poisonous to man and superinduce apoplectic symptoms

the berry about the size of a small currant is rather good though like all the new zealand berries insipid and is quite harmless if the stones are not swallowed tutu grows chiefly on and in the neighbourhood of sandy river beds but occurs more or less all over the settlement and causes considerable damage every year horses won't touch it as then my bullocks could not get tooted on being turned out empty i yarded them

the next day we made thirteen miles over the plains to waikiti written waikiriri or selwyn still the same monotonous plains the same interminable tussock dotted with the same cabbage trees on the morrow ten more monotonous miles to the banks of the rakaia this river is one of the largest in the province second only to the waitaki it contains about as much water as the rhone above martigny perhaps even more

but it rather resembles an italian than a swiss river with due care it is fordable in many places though very rarely so when occupying a single channel it is however seldom found in one stream but flows like the rest of these rivers with alternate periods of rapid and comparatively smooth water every few yards the place to look for a ford is just above a spit where the river forks into two or more branches

there is generally here a bar of shingle with shallow water while immediately below in each stream there is a dangerous rapid a very little practice and knowledge of each river will enable a man to detect a ford at a glance these fords shift every fresh in the waimakariri or rangatata they occur every quarter of a mile or less in the rakaia you may go three or four miles for a good one

during a fresh the rakaia is not fordable at any rate no one ought to ford it but the two first-named rivers may be crossed with great care in pretty heavy freshes without the water going higher than the knees of the rider it is always however an unpleasant task to cross a river when full without a thorough previous acquaintance with it

then a glance at the colour and consistency of the water will give a good idea whether the fresh is coming down at its height or falling when the ordinary volume of the stream is known the height of the water can be estimated at a spot never before seen with wonderful correctness the rakaia sometimes comes down with a run a wall of water two feet high rolling over and over rushes down with irresistible force

i know a gentleman who had been looking at some sheep upon an island in the rocaya and after finishing his survey was riding leisurely to the bank on which his house was situated

suddenly he saw the river coming down upon him in the manner i have described and not more than two or three hundred yards off by a forcible application of the spur he was enabled to reach terra firma just in time to see the water sweeping with an awful roar over the spot that he had traversed not a second previously this is not frequent a fresh generally takes four or five hours to come down

and from two days to a week ten days or a fortnight to subside again if i were to speak of the rise of the rakaia or rather of the numerous branches which form it of their vast and wasteful beds

the glaciers that they spring from one of which comes down half-way across the river-bed thus tending to prove that the glaciers are descending for the river-bed is both above and below the glacier of the wonderful gorge with its terraces rising shelf upon shelf like fortifications many hundred feet above the river the crystals found there and the wild pigs

I should weary the reader too much and fill half a volume. The bullocks must again claim our attention, and I unwillingly revert to my subject. On the night of our arrival at the Rukaiya, I did not yard the bullocks, as they seemed inclined to stay quietly with some others that were about the place. Next morning they were gone, were they up the river or down the river, across the river or gone back.

Let's say you were at Cambridge and have lost your bullocks. They were bred in Yorkshire, but have been used a good deal in the neighbourhood of Dorchester, and may have consequently made in either direction. They may, however, have worked down the cam, and be in full feed for Lynn, or again, they may be snugly stowed away in a gully, halfway between Fitzwilliam Museum and Trumpington.

you saw a mob of cattle feeding quietly about mattingly on the preceding evening and they may have joined in with these or were they attracted by the fine feed in the neighbourhood of charrington where shall you go to look for them matters in reality however are not so bad as this a bullock cannot walk without leaving a track if the ground he travels on is capable of receiving one

again if he does not know the country in advance of him the chances are strong that he has gone back the way he came he will travel in a track if he happens to light on one he finds it easier going animals are cautious in proceeding onward when they don't know the ground they have ever a lion in their path until they know it and have found it free from beasts of prey if however they have been seen heading decidedly in any direction over-night

in that direction they will most likely be found sooner or later bullocks cannot go long without water they will travel to a river then they will eat drink and be merry and during that period of fatal security they will be caught ours had gone back ten miles to the waikiti we soon obtained clues as to their whereabouts and had them back again in time to proceed on our journey

the river being very low we did not unload the dray and put the contents across in the boat but drove the bullock straight through eighteen weary monotonous miles over the same plants covered with the same tussock grass and dotted with the same cabbage trees

the mountains however grew gradually nearer and banks peninsula dwindled perceptibly that night we made mr m s station and were thankful again we did not yard the bullocks and again we lost them they were only five miles off but we did not find them till afternoon and lost a day

as they had travelled in all nearly forty miles i had had mercy upon them intending that they should fill themselves well during the night and be ready for a long pull next day even the merciful man himself however would accept a working bullock from the beasts who have any claim upon his good feeling let him go straining his eyes examining every dark spot in a circumference many long miles in extent let him gallop a couple of miles in this direction and the other

and discover that he has only been lessening the distance between himself and a group of cabbage trees.

let him feel the word bullock eating itself in indelible characters into his heart and he will refrain from mercy to working bullocks as long as he lives but as there are few positive pleasures equal in intensity to the negative one of release from pain so it is when at last a group of six oblong objects five dark and one white appears in the remote distance distinct and unmistakable yes they are our bullocks

a sigh of relief follows and we drive them sharply home gloating over their distended tongues and slobbering mouths if there is one thing a bullock hates worse than another it is being driven too fast his heavy lumbering carcass is mated with a no less lumbering soul he is a good slow steady patient slave if you let him take his own time about it but don't hurry him he has played a very important part in the advancement of civilization

and the development of the resources of the world a part which the more fiery horse could not have played let us then bear with his heavy trailing gait and uncouth movements only next time we will keep him tight even though he starve for it if bullocks be invariably driven sharply back to the dray

whenever they have strayed from it they will soon learn not to go far off and will be cured even of the most inveterate vagrant habits now we follow up one branch of the ashburton and commence making straight for the mountains

still however we are on the same monotonous plains and crawl our twenty miles with very few objects that can possibly serve as landmarks it is wonderful how small an object gets a name in the great dearth of features cabbage tree hill half-way between maine's and the waikiti is an almost imperceptible rise some ten yards across and two or three feet high the cabbage trees have disappeared

between the rakaia and mr m s station is a place they call the half-way gully it is neither a gully nor half-way being only a grip in the earth causing no perceptible difference in the level of the track and extending but a few yards on either side of it

So between Mr. M's and the next halting place, save two sheep stations, I remembered nothing but a curiously shaped kohai tree and a dead bullock that can form milestones, as it were, to mark progress. Each person, however, for himself, makes innumerable ones, such as where one peak in the mountain range goes behind another, and so on. In the small river Ashburton, or rather in one of its most trivial branches,

we had a little misunderstanding with the bullocks. The leaders, for some reason, best known to themselves, slewed sharply round and tied themselves into an inextricable knot with the polars, while the body bullocks, by a maneuver not unfrequent, shifted, or as it is technically termed, slipped, the yoke under their necks and the bows off, the off bullock turning upon the near side and the near bullock upon the off,

by what means they do this i cannot explain but believe it would make a conjurer's fortune in england how they got the chains between their legs and how they kicked to liberate themselves how we abused them and finally unchaining them set them right i need not here particularize we finally triumphed but this delay caused us not to reach our destination till after dark

here the good woman of the house took us into her confidence in the matter of her corns from the irritated condition of which she argued that bad weather was about to ensue

the next morning however we started anew and after about three or four miles entered the valley of the south and larger ashburton bidding adieu to the plains completely and now that i approach the description of the gorge i feel utterly unequal to the task not because the scene is awful or beautiful for in this respect the gorge of the ashburton is less remarkable than most but because the subject of gorges is replete with difficulty

and I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon they exhibit. It is not, however, my province to attempt this. I must content myself with narrating what I see. First, there is the river, flowing very rapidly upon a bed of large shingle, with alternate rapids and smooth places, constantly forking and constantly reuniting itself, like tangled skeins of silver ribbon, surrounding those in shaped islets of sand and gravel.

On either side is a long flat, composed of shingle, similar to the bed of the river itself, but covered with vegetation, tussock and scrub, with fine feed for sheep or cattle, among the burnt Irishman thickets. The flat is some half mile broad on each side of the river, narrowing as the mountains draw in closer upon the stream. It is terminated by a steep terrace. Twenty or thirty feet above this terrace is another flat,

we will say semicircular for i am generalizing which again is surrounded by a steeply sloping terrace like an amphitheatre above this another flat receding still farther back perhaps half a mile in places perhaps almost close above the one below it above this another flat receding farther and so on until the level of the plain proper or highest flat is several hundred feet above the river

i have not seen a single river in canterbury which is not more or less terraced even below the gorge the angle of the terrace is always very steep i seldom see one less than forty-five degrees one always has to get off and lead one's horse down except when an artificial cutting has been made or advantage can be taken of some gully that descends into the flat below

tributary streams are terraced in like manner on a small scale while even the mountain creeks repeat the phenomena in miniature the terraces being always highest where the river emerges from its gorge and slowly dwindling down as it approaches the sea until finally instead of the river being many hundred feet below the level of the plains as is the case at the foot of the mountains the plains near the sea are considerably below the water in the river

as on the north side of the Rakiya, before described. Our road lay up the Ashburton, which we had repeatedly to cross and recross. A dray going through a river is a pretty sight enough when you are utterly unconcerned in the contents thereof. The rushing water stemmed by the bullocks and the dray, the energetic appeals of the driver to Tommy or Knobbler to lift the dray over the large stones in the river, the creaking dray, the cracking whip,

form a tout ensemble rather agreeable than otherwise.

but when the bullocks having pulled the dray into the middle of the river refuse entirely to pull it out again when the leaders turn sharp round and look at you or stick their heads under the bellies of the pullers when the gentle pats on the forehead with the stalk of the whip prove unavailing and you are obliged to recourse to strong measures it is less agreeable especially if the animals turn just after having got your dray half-way up the bank

and, twisting it round upon a steeply inclined surface, throw the center of gravity far beyond the base, over goes the dray into the water.

"'Alas, my sugar, my tea, my flour, my crockery! It is all over. Drop the curtain!' I beg to state my dray did not upset this time, though the centre of gravity fell far without the base. What Newton says on that subject is erroneous. So are those illustrations of natural philosophy, in which a loaded dray is represented as necessarily about to fall, because a dotted line from the centre of gravity falls outside the wheels.'

it takes a great deal more to upset a well-loaded dray than one would have imagined though sometimes the most unforeseen trifle will effect it possibly the value of the contents may have something to do with it but my ideas are not yet fully formed upon the subject we made about seventeen miles and crossed the river ten times so that the bullocks which had never before been accustomed to river work became quite used to it and manageable and have continued so ever since

We halted for the night at a shepherd's hut, awakening out of slumber. I heard the fitful gusts of violent wind come puff, puff, buffet, and die away again. Nor'wester all over. I went out and saw the unmistakable northwest clouds tearing away in front of the moon. I remember Mrs. W.'s corns and anathematized them in my heart. It may be imagined that I turned out of a comfortable bed, slipped on my boots, and then went out.

no such thing we were all lying in our clothes with one blanket between us and the bare floor our heads pillowed on our saddle-bags the next day we made only three miles to mr p s station there we unloaded the dray greased it and restored half the load intending to make another journey for the remainder as the road was very bad one dray had been over the ground before us

that took four days to do the first ten miles and then was delayed several weeks on the bank of the rangatata by a series of very heavy freshes so we determined on trying a different route we got farther on our first day than our predecessor had done in two and then possum one of the bullocks lay down i am afraid he had had an awful hammering in a swampy creek where he had stuck for two hours and would not stir an inch so we turned them all adrift with their yokes on

"'Had we taken them off, we could not have yoked them up again. "'Whereat Possum began feeding in a manner which plainly showed "'that there had not been much amiss with him. "'But during the interval that elapsed between our getting into the swampy creek "'and getting out of it, a great change had come over the weather. "'While poor Possum was being chastised, I had been reclining on the bank hard by, "'and occasionally interceding for the unhappy animal. "'The men were all at him.'

but what is one to do if one's dray is buried nearly to the axle in a bog and possum won't pull so i was taking it easy without coat or waistcoat and even then feeling as if no place could be too cool to please me for the nor'wester was still blowing strong and intensely hot when suddenly i felt a chill and looking at the lake below saw that the white-headed waves had changed their direction and that the wind had chopped round to sou'west

we left the dray and went on some two or three miles on foot for the purpose of camping where there was firewood there was hut too in the place for which we were making it was not yet roofed and had neither door nor window but as it was near firewood and water we made for it had supper and turned in

in the middle of the night someone poking his nose out of his blanket informed us that it was snowing and in the morning we found it continuing to do so with a good sprinkling on the ground we thought nothing of it and returning to the dray found the bullocks put them to and started on our way but when we came above the gully at the bottom of which the hut lay we were obliged to give in there was a very bad creek which we tried in vain for an hour or so to cross

The snow was falling very thickly and driving right into the Bullocks' faces. We were all very cold and weary and determined to go down to the hut again, expecting fine weather in the morning. We carried down a kettle, a camp oven, some flour, tea, sugar, and salt beef. Also a novel or two, and the future towels of the establishment, which wanted hemming. Also the two cats."

Thus equipped, we went down the gully and got back to the hut about three o'clock in the afternoon. The gully sheltered us, and there the snow was kind and warm, though bitterly cold on the terrace. We threw a few burnt Irishman sticks across the top of the walls, and put a couple of counterpanes over them, thus obtaining a little shelter near the fire. The

the snow inside the hut was about six inches deep and soon became sloppy so that at night we preferred to make a hole in the snow and sleep outside the fall continued all that night and in the morning we found ourselves thickly covered it was still snowing hard so there was no stirring we read the novels hemmed the towels smoked and took it philosophically there is plenty of firewood to keep us warm by night the snow was fully two feet thick everywhere and in drifts five and six feet

i determined that we would have some grog and had no sooner hinted the bright idea than two volunteers undertook the rather difficult task of getting it the terrace must have been one hundred and fifty feet above the hut

it was very steep intersected by numerous gullies filled with deeply drifted snow from the top it was yet a full quarter of a mile to the place where we had left the dray still the brave fellows inspired with hope started in full confidence while we put our kettle on the fire and joyfully awaited their return

they had been gone at least two hours and we were getting fearful that they had broached the cask and helped themselves too liberally on the way when they returned in triumph with the two-gallon keg vowing that never in their lives before had they worked so hard how unjustly we had suspected them will appear in the sequel great excitement prevailed over drawing the cork it was fast it broke the point of someone's knife

shove it in said i breathless with impatience no no it yielded and shortly afterwards giving up all opposition came quickly out a tin pannikin was produced with a gurgling sound out flowed the precious liquid halloa said one it's not brandy it's port wine

"'Port wine!' cried another. "'It smells more like rum.' I voted for its being claret. Another moment, however, settled the question, and established the contents of the cask as being excellent vinegar. The two unfortunate men had brought the vinegar keg instead of the brandy. The rest may be imagined. That night, however, two of us were attacked with diarrhoea.

and the vinegar proved of great service, for vinegar and water is an admirable remedy for this complaint. The snow continued till afternoon the next day.

it then sulkily ceased and commenced thawing at night it froze very hard indeed and the next day a nor'wester sprang up which made the snow disappear with a most astonishing rapidity not having then learnt that no amount of melting snow will produce any important effect upon the river and fearing that it might rise we determined to push on but this was as yet impossible

next morning however we made an early start and got triumphantly to our journey's end at about half-past ten o'clock my own country which lay considerably lower was entirely free of snow while we learned afterwards that it had never been deeper than four inches chapter seven section nine which is chapter eight of a first year in canterbury settlement by samuel butler the slip of recording is in the public domain

Read by Gail Timmerman Vaughan. Chapter 8. Taking Up the Run. Hut Within the Boundary. Land Regulations. Race to Christchurch. Contest for Priority of Application. Successful Issue. Winds and Their Effects. Their Conflicting Currents. Sheep Crossing the River. There was a little hut on my run built by another person, and tenanted by his shepherd.

g had an application for five thousand acres in the same block of country with mine and as the boundaries were uncertain until the hole was surveyed and the runs definitely marked out on the government maps he had placed his hut upon a spot that turned out eventually not to belong to him

I had waited to see how the land was allotted before I took it up. Knowing the country well and finding it allotted to my satisfaction, I made my bargain on the same day that the question was settled. I took a tracing from the government map with me, and we arrived on the run about a fortnight after the allotment. It was necessary for me to wait for this, or I might have made the same mistake which G had done.

his hut was placed where it was now of no use to him whatever but on the very site on which i had myself intended to build it is beyond all possibility of doubt upon my run but g is a very difficult man to deal with and i have had a hard task to get rid of him to allow him to remain where he was was not to be thought of but i was perfectly ready to pay him for his hut such as it is and his yard

knowing him to be at p s i sent the men to their contract and went down next day to see him and to offer him any compensation for the loss of his hut which a third party might arrange i could do nothing with him he threatened fiercely and would hear no reason

my only remedy was to go down to christchurch at once and buy the freehold of the site from the government the canterbury regulations concerning the purchase of waste lands from the crown are among the best existing they are all free to any purchaser with the exception of a few government reserves for certain public purposes as railway township reserves and so forth

every run holder has a pre-emptive right over two hundred and fifty acres round his homestead and fifty acres round any other buildings he may have upon his run he must register this right or it is of no avail by this means he is secured from an enemy buying up his homestead without his previous knowledge whoever wishes to purchase a sheep farmers homestead must first give him a considerable notice

and then can only buy if the occupant refuses to do so at the price of two pounds an acre of course the occupant would not refuse and the thing is consequently never attempted

all the rest however of any man's run is open to purchase at the rate of two pounds per acre this price is sufficient to prevent monopoly and yet not high enough to interfere with a small capitalist the sheep farmer cannot buy up his run and stand in the way of the development of the country

and at the same time he is secured from the loss of it through others buying because the price is too high to make it worth a man's while to do so when so much better investments are still open on the plains however many run holders are becoming seriously uneasy even at the present price

and blocks of one thousand acres are frequently bought with a view to their being fenced in and laid down in english grasses in the back country this has not yet commenced nor is it likely to do so for many years but to return firstly g had not registered any pre-emptive right and secondly if he had it would have been worthless because his hut was situated on my run and not on his own

i was sure that he had not bought the freehold i was also certain that he meant to buy it so well knowing there was not a moment to lose i went towards christchurch this same afternoon and supped at a shepherd's hut three miles lower down and intended to travel quietly all night the ashburton however was heavily freshed and the night was pitch dark after crossing and recrossing it four times i was afraid to go on and camping down waited for daylight

resuming my journey with early dawn i had not gone far when happening to turn around i saw a man on horseback about a quarter of a mile behind me i knew at once that this was g and letting him come up with me we rode for some miles together each of us of course well aware of the other's intentions but too politic to squabble about them when squabbling was no manner of use

it was then early on the wednesday morning and the board sat on the following day a book is kept at the land office called the application book in which anyone who has business with the board enters his name and his case is attended to in the order in which his name stands the race between g and myself was as to who should be first to get his name down in this book and secure the ownership of the hut by purchasing the freehold of twenty-five acres round it

We had nearly a hundred miles to ride. The office closed at four in the afternoon, and I knew that G could not possibly be in time for that day. I had therefore till ten o'clock on the following morning, that is to say, about twenty-four hours from the time we parted company. Knowing that I could be in town by that time, I took it easy and halted for breakfast at the first station we came to. G went on, and I saw him no more.

I feared that our applications would be simultaneous, or that we should have an indecorous scuffle for the book in the land office itself. In this case, there would only have remained the unsatisfactory alternative of drawing lots for precedence. There was nothing for it but to go on and see how matters would turn up.

Before midday, and while still sixty miles from town, my horse knocked out completely, and would not go another step. G's horse, only two months before, had gone a hundred miles in less than fifteen hours, and was now pitted against mine, which was thoroughly done up. Rather anticipating this, I had determined on keeping the tracks, thus passing stations, where I might get a chance of getting a fresh mount.

G. took a short cut, saving fully ten miles in distance, but traveling over a very stony country with no track. A track is a great comfort to a horse. I shall never forget my relief when, at a station where I had already received great kindness, I obtained the loan of a horse that had been taken up that morning from a three-month spell.

no greater service could at the time have been rendered me and i felt that i had indeed met with a friend in need the prospect was now brilliant save that the rakaia was said to be very heavily freshed fearing i might have to swim for it i left my watch at m s and went on with a satisfactory reflection that at any rate if i could not cross g could not do so either

to my delight however the river was very low and i forded it without the slightest difficulty a little before sunset a few hours afterwards down it came i heard that g was an hour ahead of me but this was of no consequence riding ten miles farther and now only twenty-five miles from christchurch i called at an accommodation house and heard that g was within so went on and determined to camp and rest my horse

The night was again intensely dark, and it soon came on to rain so heavily that there was nothing for it but to start again for the next accommodation house, twelve miles from town. I slept there a few hours, and by seven o'clock next morning was in Christchurch. So was G. We could neither of us do anything till the land office opened at ten o'clock. At twenty minutes before ten I repaired thither, expecting to find G in waiting and anticipating a rowe.

"'If it came to fists, I should get the worst of it. "'That was a moral certainty, "'and I really half feared something of the kind. "'To my surprise, the office doors were open, "'all the rooms were open, "'and on reaching that in which the application book was kept, "'I found it already upon the table. "'I opened it with trembling fingers "'and saw my adversary's name written in bold handwriting, "'defying me, as it were, to do my worst.'

The clock, as the clerk was ready to witness, was twenty minutes before ten. I learned from him also that G. had written his name down about half an hour. This was all right. My course was to wait till after ten, write my name, and oppose G.'s application, as having been entered unduly and before office hours. I have no doubt that I should have succeeded in gaining my point in this way, but a much easier victory was in store for me.

running my eye through the list of names to my great surprise i saw my own among them it had been entered by my solicitor on another matter of business the previous day but it stood next below g s g s name then had clearly been inserted unfairly out of due order the whole thing was made clear to the commissioners of the wastelands and i need not say that i effected my purchase without difficulty

a few weeks afterwards allowing him for his hut and yard i bought g out entirely i will now return to the rangitata there is a large flat on either side of it sloping very gently down to the river bed proper which is from one to two miles across the one flat belongs to me and that on the north bank to another the river is very easily crossed as it flows in a great many channels in a fresh therefore it is still often fordable

We found it exceedingly low as the preceding cold had frozen up the sources, whilst the nor'wester that followed was of short duration and unaccompanied with the hot tropical rain which causes the freshes. The nor'westers are vulgarly supposed to cause freshes simply by melting the snow upon the back ranges. We, however, and all who live near the Great Range,

and see the nor'wester while still among the snowy ranges know for certain that the river does not rise more than two or three inches nor lose its beautiful milky blue color unless the wind be accompanied with rain upon the great range rain extending sometimes as low down as the commencement of the plains these rains are warm and heavy and make the feed beautifully green the nor'westers are a very remarkable feature in the climate of this settlement

they are excessively violent sometimes shaking the very house hot and dry from having already poured out their moisture and enervating like the italian scirocco the fact seems to be that the nor'west winds come heated from the tropics and charged with moisture from the ocean and this is precipitated by the ice-fields of the mountains in deluges of rain chiefly on the western side but occasionally extending some distance to the east

they blow from two or three hours to as many days and if they last any length of time are generally succeeded by a sudden change to sou'-west the cold rainy or snowy wind we catch the nor'-west in full force but are sheltered from the sou'-west which with us is a quiet wind accompanied with gentle drizzling but cold rain

and in the winter snow the nor'wester is first descried on the river-bed through the door of my hut from which the snowy range is visible at our early breakfast i see a lovely summer's morning breathlessly quiet and intensely hot suddenly a little cloud of dust is driven down the river-bed a mile and a half off it increases till one would think the river was on fire

and that the opposite mountains were obscured by volumes of smoke still it is calm with us by and by as the day increases the wind gathers strength and extending beyond the river-bed gives the flats on either side a benefit then it catches the downs and generally blows hard till four or five o'clock when it calms down and is followed by a cool and tranquil night delightful to every sense

if however the wind does not cease and it has been raining up the gorges there will be a fresh and if the rain has come down any distance from the main range it will be a very heavy fresh while if there has been a clap or two of thunder a very rare occurrence it will be a fresh in which the river will not be fordable

The floods come and go with great rapidity. The river will begin to rise a very few hours after the rain commences, and will generally have subsided to its former level about 48 hours after the rain has ceased. As we generally come in for the tail end of the nor'western rains,

so we sometimes though less frequently get that of the sou'west winds also the sou'west rain comes to us up the river through the lower gorge and is consequently sou'east rain with us owing to the direction of the valley but it is always called sou'west if it comes from the southward at all in fact there are only three recognized wind the north-west the north-east and the south-west

and I never recollect perceiving the wind to be in any other quarter, saving from local causes.

The northeast is most prevalent in summer and blows with delightful freshness during the greater part of the day, often rendering the hottest weather very pleasant. It is curious to watch the battle between the northwest and southeast wind, as we often see it. For some days, perhaps, the upper gorges may have been obscured with dark and surging clouds, and the snowy ranges hidden from view. Suddenly, the mountains at the lower end of the valley become banked up with clouds,

and the sand begins to blow up the river-bed some miles below while it is still blowing down with us the southerly burster as it is called gradually creeps up and at last drives the other off the field a few chilly puffs then a great one and in a minute or two the air becomes cold even in the height of summer indeed i have seen snow fall on the twelfth of january

it was not much but the air was as cold as in midwinter the force of the southwest wind is here broken by the front ranges and on these it often leaves its rain or snow while we are quite exempt from either we frequently hear both of more rain and of more snow on the plains than we have had though my hut is at an elevation of one thousand eight hundred and forty feet above the level of the sea

on the plains it will often blow for forty-eight hours accompanied by torrents of pelting pitiless rain and is sometimes so violent that there is hardly any possibility of making headway against it sheep race before it as hard as they can go helter-skelter leaving their lambs behind them to shift for themselves there is no shelter on the plains and unless stopped by the shepherds they will drive from one river to the next

the shepherds therefore have a hard time of it for they must be out till the wind goes down and the worse the weather the more absolutely necessary it is that they should be with the sheep different flocks not unfrequently join during these gales and the nuisance to both the owners is very great in the back country sheep can always find shelter in the gullies or under the lee of the mountain

we have here been singularly favoured with regard to snow this last winter for whereas i was absolutely detained by the snow upon the plains on my way from christchurch because my horse would have had nothing to eat had i gone on when i arrived at home i found they had been all astonishment as to what could possibly have been keeping me so long away

the nor'westers sometimes blow even in midwinter but are most frequent in spring and summer sometimes continuing for a fortnight together during a nor'wester the sand on the river-bed is blinding filling eyes nose and ears and stinging sharply every exposed part i lately had the felicity of getting a small mob of sheep into the river-bed with a view of crossing them on my own country whilst this wind was blowing

there were only between seven and eight hundred and as we were three with two dogs we expected to be able to put them through ourselves we did so through the first two considerable streams and then could not get them to move on any farther

as they paused i will take the opportunity to digress and describe the process of putting sheep across a river the first thing is to carefully secure a spot fitted for the purpose for which the principal requisites are first that the current set for the opposite bank so that the sheep will be carried towards it

sheep cannot swim against a strong current and if the stream be flowing evenly down mid channel they will be carried down a long way before they land if however it sets at all towards the side from which they started they will probably be landed by the stream on that same side therefore the current should flow towards the opposite bank secondly there must be a good landing-place for the sheep

a spot must not be selected where the current sweeps underneath a hollow bank of gravel or a perpendicular wall of shingle the bank unto which the sheep are to land must shelve no matter how steeply provided it does not rise perpendicularly out of the water thirdly a good place must be chosen for putting them in the water must not become deep all at once or the sheep won't face it it must be shallow at the commencement

so that they may have got too far to recede before they find their mistake.

fourthly there should be no to-to in the immediate vicinity of either the place where the sheep are put into the river or that unto which they are to come out for in spite of your most frantic endeavours you will be very liable to get some sheep tooted these requisites being secured the depth of the water is of course a matter of no moment the narrowness of the stream being a point of far greater importance these rivers abound in places combining every requisite

The sheep being mobbed up together near the spot where they are intended to enter the water, the best plan is to split off a small number, say 100 or 150. A large mob would be less easily managed. Dog them, bark at them yourself furiously, beat them, spread out arms and legs to prevent their escaping, and raise all the unpleasant din about their ears that you possibly can. In spite of all that you can do, they will very likely break through you and make back.

if so persevere as before and in about ten minutes a single sheep will be seen eyeing the opposite bank and evidently meditating an attempt to gain it pause a moment that you interrupt not a consummation so devoutly to be wished the sheep bounds forward with three or four jumps into mid-stream

is carried down and thence on to the opposite bank immediately that one sheep has entered let one man get into the river below them and splash water up at them to keep them from working lower and lower down the stream and getting into a bad place let another be bringing up the remainder of the mob so that they may have come up before the whole of the leading body are over

if this be done they will cross in a string of their own accord and there will be no more trouble from the moment when the first sheep entered the water if the sheep were obstinate and will not take the water it is a good plan to haul one or two over first pulling them through by the near hind leg

these will often entice the others or a few lambs will encourage their mothers to come over to them unless indeed they immediately swim back to their mothers the first was the plan we adopted as i said our sheep were got across the first two streams without much difficulty then they became completely silly the awful wind so high that we could scarcely hear ourselves talk

the blinding sand the cold glacier water rendered more chilly by the strong wind which contrary to custom was very cold all combined to make them quite stupid the little lambs stuck up their backs and shut their eyes and looked very shaky on their legs

while the bigger ones and the ewes would do nothing but turn round and stare at us our dogs knocked up completely and we ourselves were somewhat tired and hungry partly from night watching and partly from having fasted since early dawn whereas it was now four o'clock

Still, we must get the sheep over somehow, for a heavy fresh was evidently about to come down. The river was yet low, and could we get them over before dark, they would be at home. I rode home to fetch assistance and food. These arriving by our united efforts, we got them over every stream save the last, before eight o'clock, and then it became quite dark and we left them. The wind changed from very cold to very hot, and it literally blew hot and cold in the same breath.

rain came down in torrents six claps of thunder thunder is very rare here followed in succession about midnight and very uneasy we all were next morning before daybreak we were by the river-side the fresh had come down and we crossed over to the sheep with difficulty finding them up to their bellies in water huddled up in a mob together

we shifted them on to one of the numerous islands where they were secure and had plenty of feed the river having greatly risen since we had got upon its bed in two days time it had gone down sufficiently to allow of our getting the sheep over and we did so without the loss of a single one i hardly know why i have introduced this into an account of a trip with a bullock-dray it is however a colonial incident such as might happen any day

in a life of continual excitement one thinks very little of these things they may however serve to give english readers a glimpse of some of the numerous incidents which constantly occurring in one shape or other render the life of a colonist not only endurable but actually pleasant chapter eight section ten which is chapter nine of a first year in canterbury settlement by samuel butler

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Gail Timmerman Vaughan. Chapter 9. Plants of Canterbury. Turnip. Tutu. Ferns. Teapalm. Birds. Paradise duck. Turn. Quail. Woodhen. Robin. Linnet. Pigeon. Moa. New parakeet. Quadrupeds. Eels. Insects. Weta. Lizards.

the flora of this province is very disappointing and the absence of beautiful flowers adds to the uninteresting character which too generally pervades the scenery save among the great southern alps themselves there is no burst of bloom as there is in switzerland and italy and the trees being with few insignificant exceptions all evergreen the difference between winter and summer is chiefly perceptible by the state of the grass and the temperature

I do not know one pretty flower which belongs to the plains. I believe there are one or two, but they are rare and form no feature in the landscape. I never yet saw a blue flower growing wild here, nor indeed one of any other color but white or yellow. If there are such, they do not prevail, and their absence is sensibly felt.

We have no saldanellas and auriculas and alpine cowslips, no brilliant gentians and anemones. We have one very stupid white gentian, but it is, to say the least of it, uninteresting to a casual observer. We have violets very like those at home, but they are small and white and have no scent. We have also a daisy, very like the English, but not nearly so pretty. We have a great ugly sort of Michaelmas daisy, too.

and any amount of Spaniard. I do not say that by hunting on the peninsula one might find one or two beautiful species, but simply that on the whole the flowers are few and ugly. The only plant good to eat is Maori cabbage, and that is Swede turnip, gone wild, from seed left by Captain Cook. Some say it is indigenous, but I do not believe it.

the maoris carry the seed about with them and sow it wherever they camp i should write used to sow it where they camped for the maoris in this island are almost a thing of the past the root of the spaniard it should be added will support life for some time tutu pronounced toot is a plant which abounds upon the plains for some miles near the river beds it is at first sight not much unlike myrtle but is in reality a wholly different sort of plant

It dies down in the winter and springs up again from its old roots. These roots are sometimes used for firewood and are very tough, so much so as, not unfrequently, to break plows. It is poisonous for sheep and cattle if eaten on an empty stomach. New Zealand is rich in ferns. We have a tree fern which grows as high as 20 feet.

we have also some of the english species among them i believe the hymenophyllum tonbrigensi with many of the same tribe i see a little fern which to my eyes is our english esplenium trichomanes every english fern which i know has a variety something like it here though seldom identical we have one to correspond with the adder's tongue and moonwort with the adiantum nigrum and capillus veneris

with the blechnum boreal and the cedarac and ruta muraria and with the sestuptorids i never saw a woodsy a-here but i think that every other english family is represented and that we have many more besides on the whole the british character of many of the ferns is rather striking

as indeed is the case with our birds and insects, but with a few conspicuous exceptions, the old country has greatly the advantage over us. The cabbage tree or tea palm is not a true palm, though it looks like one. It has not the least resemblance to a cabbage. It has a tuft of green leaves which are rather palmy looking at a distance, and which springs from the top of a pithy, worthless stem, varying from one to twenty or thirty feet in height.

sometimes the stem is branched at the top and each branch ends in a tuft the flax and the cabbage-tree and the tussock grass are the great botanical features of the country add fern and tutu and for the back country spear-grass and irishman and we have summed up such prevalent plants as strike the eye as for the birds they appear at first sight very few indeed on the plains one sees a little lark with two white feathers in the tail

and in other respects exactly like the english skylark save that he does not soar and has only a little chirrup instead of a song there are also paradise ducks hawks terns redbills and sandpipers seagulls and occasionally though very rarely a quail the paradise duck is a very beautiful bird the male appears black with white on the wing when flying

when on the ground however he shows some dark greys and glossy greens and russets which make him very handsome he is truly a goose and not a duck he says whizz through his throat and dwells a long time upon the zed he is about the size of a farmyard duck the plumage of the female is really gorgeous her head is pure white and her body beautifully coloured with greens and russets and white she screams and does not say

her maid is much fonder of her than she is of him for if she is wounded he will come to see what is the matter whereas if he is hurt his base partner flies instantly off and seeks new wedlock affording a fresh example of the superior fidelity of the male to the female sex when they have young they feign lameness like the plover i have several times been thus tricked by them

one soon however becomes an old bird oneself and is not to be caught with such chaff any more we look about for the young ones clip off the top joint of one wing and leave them thus in a few months time we can get prime young ducks for the running after them the old birds are very bad eating i rather believe they are aware of this for they are very bold and come very close to us

There are two that constantly come within ten yards of my hut, and I hope mean to build in the neighborhood, for the eggs are excellent. Being geese and not ducks, they eat grass. The young birds are called flappers till they can fly, and can be run down easily. The hawk is simply a large hawk, and to the unscientific nothing more. There is a small sparrowhawk too, which is very bold, and which will attack a man if he goes near its nest.

the tern is a beautiful little bird about twice as big as a swallow and somewhat resembling it in its flight but much more graceful it has a black satin head and lavender satin and white over the rest of its body it has an orange bill in feet and is not seen in the back country during the winter the red bill is i believe identical with the oyster-catcher of the cornish coast

It has a long orange bill and orange feet, and is black and white over the body. The sandpiper is very like the lark in Plumage. The quail is nearly exterminated. It is exactly like a small partridge, and is most excellent eating. Ten years ago it was very abundant, but now it is very rarely seen.

"'The poor little thing is entirely defenceless. "'It cannot take more than three flights, and then it is done up. "'Some say the fires have destroyed them, "'some say the sheep have trod on their eggs, "'some that they have all been hunted down. "'But my own opinion is that the wild cats, "'which have increased so as to be very numerous, "'have driven the little creatures nearly off the face of the earth. "'There are woodhens also on the plains, "'but though very abundant, they are not much seen.'

the wood hen is a bird rather resembling the pheasant tribe in plumage but not so handsome it has a long sharp bill and long feet it is about the size of a hen it cannot fly but sticks its little bob-tail up and down whenever it walks and has a curious paw-pry like gait which is rather amusing

it is exceedingly bold and will come sometimes right into a house it is an errant thief moreover and will steal anything i know of a case in which one was seen to take up a gold watch and run off with it and another in which a number of men who were camping out left their pannikins at the camp and on their return found them all gone and only recovered them by hearing the woodhens tapping their bills against them anything bright exceeds their greed anything red their indignation

They are reckoned good eating by some, but most people think them exceedingly rank and unpleasant.

From fat wood hens a good deal of oil can be got, and this oil is very valuable for most anything where oil is wanted. It is sovereign for rheumatics and wounds or bruises, for softening one's boots, and so forth. The egg is about the size of a guinea fowl's, dirtily streaked and spotted with a dusky purple. It is one of the best eating eggs I have ever tasted. I must not omit to mention the white crane.

a very beautiful bird with immense wings of the purest white and the swamp hen with a tail which is constantly bobbing up and down like the wood hen it has a good deal of bluish purple about it and is very handsome there are other birds on the plains especially about the river beds but not many worthy of notice in the back country however we have a considerable variety i have mentioned the kaka and the parakeet

the robin is a pretty little fellow in build and manners very like our english robin but tamer his plumage however is different for he has a dusky black tail-coat and a pale canary-coloured waistcoat when one is camping out no sooner has one lit one's fire than several robins make their appearance prying into one's whole proceedings with true robin-like impudence they have never probably seen a fire before and are rather puzzled by it

i heard of one which first lighted on the embers which were covered with ashes finding this unpleasant he hopped on to a burning twig this was worse so the third time he lighted on a red-hot coal whereat much disgusted he took himself off i hope escaping with nothing but a blistered toe they frequently come into my hut i watched one hop in a few mornings ago when the breakfast things were set first he tried the bread that was good then he tried the sugar was good also

Then he tried the salt, which he instantly rejected, and lastly he tried a cup of hot tea, on which he flew away. I have seen them light on a candle, not a lighted one, and pack the tallow. I fear, however, that these tame ones are too often killed by the cats. The tomtit is like its English namesake in shape, but smaller, and with a glossy black head and bright yellow breast.

the wren is a beautiful little bird much smaller than the english one and with green about its plumage the tui or parson bird is a starling and has a small tuft of white cravat like feathers growing from his throat true to his starling nature he has a delicious voice we have a thrush but it is rather rare it is just like the english say that it has some red feathers in its tail

our teal is if not the same as the english teals so like it that the difference is not noticeable our linnet is a little larger than the english with a clear bell-like voice as of a blacksmith's hammer on an anvil indeed we might call him the harmonious blacksmith the pigeon is larger than the english and far handsomer he has much white and glossy green shot with purple about him and is one of the most beautiful birds i ever saw

he is very foolish and can be noosed with ease tie a string with a noose at the end of it to a long stick and you may put it round his neck and catch him the cuckas too will let you do this and in a few days become quite tame besides these there is an owl or two

these are heard occasionally but not seen often at night one hears a solemn cry of more pork more pork more pork i have heard people talk too of a laughing jackass not the australian bird of that name but no one has ever seen it

Occasionally we hear rumors of the footprint of a moa, and the Nelson surveyors found fresh foot tracks of a bird, which were measured for fourteen inches. Of this there can be little doubt, but since a wood hen's foot measures four inches, and a wood hen does not stand higher than a hen, fourteen inches is hardly long enough for the track of a moa, the largest kind of which stood fifteen feet high. We often find some of their bones lying in heap upon the ground.

but never a perfect skeleton. Little heaps of their gizzard stones, too, are constantly found. They consist of very smooth and polished flints and cornelians, with sometimes quartz. The bird generally chews rather pretty stones. I do not remember finding a single sandstone specimen of a moa gizzard stone. Those heaps are easily distinguished and very common. Few people believe in the existence of a moa.

If one or two be yet living, they will probably be found on the west coast, that yet unexplored region of forest, which may contain sleeping princesses, and gold in ton blocks, and all sorts of good things. A gentleman who lives at the Kikoras possesses a Moa's egg. It is ten inches by seven. It was discovered in a Maori grave, and must have been considered precious at the time it was buried, for the Maoris were accustomed to bury a man's valuables with him.

I really know a few other birds to tell you about. There is a good sprinkling more, but they form no feature in the country and are only interesting to the naturalist. There is the kiwi or apteryx, which is about as large as a turkey, but only found on the west coast.

there is a green ground parrot too called the cockapoo a night bird and hardly ever found on the eastern side of the island there is also a very rare and as yet unnamed kind of kaka much larger and handsomer than the kaka itself of which i and another shot one of the first if not the very first observed specimen being hungry far from home and without meat we ate the interesting creature but made a note of it for the benefit of science

since then it has found its way into more worthy hands and was a few months ago sent home to be named altogether i am acquainted with about seventy species of birds belonging to the canterbury settlement and i do not think that there are many more two albatrosses came to my woolshed about seven months ago and a dead one was found at mount peel not long since i did not see the former myself my cook

who was a sailor watched them for some time and his word may be taken i believe however that their coming so far inland is a very rare occurrence here as for the quadrupeds of new zealand they are easily disposed of there are but two a kind of rat which is now banished by the norway rat and an animal of either the otter or beaver species which is known rather by rumour than by actual certainty the fishes too will give us little trouble

there are only a sort of minnow and an eel this last grows to a great size and is abundant even in the clear rapid snow-fed rivers in every creek one may catch eels and they are excellent eating if they be cooked in such a manner as to get rid of the oil try them spitchcocked or stewed they are too oily when fried as barham says with his usual good sense

i am told that the other night a great noise was heard in the kitchen of a gentleman with whom i have the honour to be acquainted and that the servants getting up found an eel chasing a cat round the room i believe this story the eel was in a bucket of water and doomed to die upon the morrow doubtless the cat had attempted to take liberties with him on which a sudden thought struck the eel that he might as well eat the cat as the cat eat him

and he was preparing to suit the action to the word when he was discovered the insects are insignificant and ugly unlike the plants devoid of general interest there is one rather pretty butterfly like our english tortoise-shell there is a sprinkling of beetles a few ants and a detestable sand-fly that on quiet cloudy mornings especially near water is more irritating than can be described

This little beast is rather venomous, and for the first fortnight or so that I was bitten by it, every bite swelled up to a hard little button. Soon, however, one becomes case-hardened and only suffers the immediate annoyance consequent upon its tickling and pricking. There is also a large assortment of spiders. We have two, one of the ugliest looking creatures that I have ever seen. It is called Weta.

and is of tawny scorpion-like colour with long antennae and great eyes and nasty squashy looking body with i think six legs it is a kind of animal which no one would wish to touch if touched it will bite sharply some say venomously it is very common but not often seen and lives chiefly among dead wood and understones

in the north island i am told that it grows to the length of three or four inches here i never saw it longer than an inch and a half the principal reptile is an almost ubiquitous lizard summing up then the whole of the vegetable and animal productions of this settlement i think that it is not too much to say that they are decidedly inferior in beauty and interest to those of the old world you will think that i have a prejudice against the natural history of canterbury

I assure you I have no such thing, and I believe that anyone on arriving here would receive a similar impression with myself. CHAPTER X CHOICE OF A RUN BOUNDARIES MAURIES WAGES

servants, drunkenness, cooking, weathers, choice of homestead, watchfulness required, burning the country, yards for sheep, ewes and lambs, lambing season, wool sheds, sheep washing, putting up a hut, gardens, farewell. In looking for a run, some distance must be traversed. The country near Christchurch is already stalked.

the waste lands are indeed said to be wholly taken up throughout the colony wherever they are capable of supporting sheep it may however be a matter of some satisfaction to a new settler to examine this point for himself and to consider what he requires in the probable event of having to purchase the good-will of a run with the improvements upon it which can hardly be obtained under one hundred and fifty pounds per one thousand acres a river boundary is most desirable

the point above or below the confluence of two rivers is still better as there are only two sides to guard stony ground must not be considered as an impediment grass grows between the stones and a dray can travel upon it england must have been a most impracticable country to traverse before metalled roads were made here the surface is almost everywhere a compact mass of shingle it is for the most part only near the sea that the shingle is covered with soil

forest and swamp are much greater impediments to a journey than a far greater distance of hard ground would prove a river such as the cam or ouse would be far more difficult to cross without bridges than the rakaia or rangatata notwithstanding their volume and rapidity

the former are deep in mud and rarely have convenient places at which to get in or out while the latter abound in them and have a stony bed on which the wheels of your dray make no impression the stony ground will carry a sheep to each acre and a half or two acres such diseases as foot-rot are unknown owing probably to the generally dry surface of the land there are few maoris here

they inhabit the north island and are only small in numbers so may be passed over unnoticed the only effectual policy in dealing with them is to show a bold front and at the same time do them a good turn whenever you can be quite certain that your kindness will not be misunderstood as a symptom of fear there are no wild animals that will molest your sheep in australia they have to watch the flocks night and day because of the wild dogs

the yards of course are not proof against dogs and the australian shepherd's hut is built close against the yard here this is unnecessary having settled that you will take up your country or purchase the lease of it you must consider next how to get a dray on to it

Horses are not to be thought of except for riding. You must buy a dray and bullocks. The rivers here are not navigable. Wages are high. People do not leave England and go to live in the Antipodes to work for the same wages which they had at home. They want to better themselves as well as you do and the supply being limited they will ask and get from one pound to thirty shillings a week besides their board and billet. You must remember you will have a rough life at first

there will be a good deal of cold and exposure a good deal of tent-work possibly a fever or two to say nothing of the seeds of rheumatism which will give you something to meditate upon hereafter you and your men will have to be on rather a different footing from that on which you stood in england

There, if your servant were in any respect what you did not wish, you were certain of getting plenty of others to take his place. Here, if a man does not find you quite what he wishes, he is certain of getting plenty of others to employ him. In fact, he is at a premium and soon finds this out. On really good men this produces no other effect than a demand for high wages. They will be respectful and civil.

though there will be a slight but quite unobjectionable difference in their manner toward you bad men assume an air of defiance which renders their immediate dismissal a matter of necessity when you have good men however you must recognize the different position in which you stand toward them as compared with that which subsisted at home

the fact is they are more your equals and more independent of you and this being the case you must treat them accordingly i do not advise you for one moment to submit to disrespect

this would be a fatal error a man whose conduct does not satisfy you must be sent about his business as certainly as in england but when you have men who do suit you you must besides paying them handsomely you must expect them to treat you rather as an english yeoman would speak to the squire of his parish than as an english labourer would speak to him

The labor markets will not be so bad, but the good men can be had, and as long as you put up with bad men, it serves you right to be the loser by your weakness. Some good hands are very improvident, and will, for the most part, spend their money in drinking a very short time after they have earned it. They will come back possibly with a dead horse to work off, that is, a debt in the accommodation house, and will work hard for another year to have another drinking bout at the end of it.

this is a thing fatally common here such men are often for straight hands and thoroughly good fellows when away from drink but on the whole saving men are perhaps the best commend yourself to a good screw for a shepherd

if he knows the value of money he knows the value of lambs and if he has contracted the habit of being careful with his own money he will be apt to be so with yours also but in justice to the improvident it must be owned that they are often admirable men save in the one point of sobriety their political knowledge is absolutely nil and were the colony to give them political power it might as well give gunpowder to children how many hands shall you want

We will say a couple of good bush hens who will put up your hut and yards and wool shed. If you are in a hurry and have plenty of money, you can have more. Besides these, you will want a bullock driver and shepherd, unless you are shepherd yourself. You must manage the cooking among you as best you can, and must be content to wash up yourself, taking your full part in the culinary processes, or you will soon find dissatisfaction in the camp. But if you can afford to have a cook, have one by all means.

it is a great nuisance to come in from a long round after sheep and find the fire out and no hot water to make tea and to have to set to work immediately to get your men's supper for they cannot earn their supper and cook it at the same time the difficulty is that good boys are hard to get and a man that is worth anything at all will hardly take to cooking as a profession hence it comes to pass that the cooks are generally indolent and dirty fellows who don't like hard work

your college education if you have had one will doubtless have made you familiar with the art of making bread you will now proceed to discover the mysteries of boiling potatoes the uses of dripping will begin to dawn upon you and you will soon become expert in the manufacture of tallow candles

you will wash your own clothes and will learn that you must not boil flannel shirts and experience will teach you that you must eschew the promiscuous use of washing soda tempting though indeed it be if you are in a hurry if you use collars i can inform you that glenfield starch is the only starch used in the laundries of our most gracious sovereign i tell you this in confidence as it is not generally advertised

to return to the culinary department your natural poetry of palate will teach you the proper treatment of the onion and you will ere long be able to handle that inestimable vegetable with the breadth yet delicacy which it requires many other things you will learn which for your sake as well as my own i will not enumerate here let the above suffice for examples at first your weathers will run with your ewes and you will only want one shepherd

but as soon as the mob gets up to two or three thousand the weathers should be kept separate you will then want another shepherd as soon as you have secured your run you must buy sheep otherwise you lose time as the run is only valuable for the sheep it carries bring sheep shepherd men stores all at one and the same time some weathers must be included in your purchase otherwise you will run short of meat

as none of your own breeding will be ready for the knife for a year and a half to say the least of it no weather should be killed till it is two years old and then it is murder to kill an animal which brings you in such good interest by its wool and would even be better if suffered to live three years longer when you will have had its value in successive fleeces it will however pay you better to invest nearly all your money in use

and to kill your own young stock than to sink more capital than is absolutely necessary in weathers start your dray then from town and join it with your sheep on the way up your sheep will not travel more than ten miles a day if you are to do them justice so your dray must keep pace with them you will generally find plenty of firewood on the track you can camp under the dray at night in about a week you will get on to your run and very glad you will feel when you are safely come to the end of your journey

see the horses properly looked to at once then set up the tent make a good fire put the kettle on out with a frying-pan and get your supper smoke the calumet of peace and go to bed the first question is where shall you place your homestead you must put it in such a situation as will be most convenient for working the sheep these are the real masters of the place the run is theirs not yours you cannot bear this in mind too diligently

all considerations of pleasantness of sight must succumb to this you must fix on such a situation as not to cut up the run by splitting off a little corner too small to give the sheep free scope and room they will fight rather shy of your homestead you may be certain so the homestead must be out of their way you must however have water and firewood at hand

which is a great convenience to say nothing of the saving of labor and expense therefore if you can find a bush near a stream make your homestead on the lee side of it a stream as a boundary in your hut if built in such a position will interfere with your sheep as little as possible the sheep will make for rising ground and hillside to camp at night

and generally feed with their heads up the wind, if it is not too violent. As your mob increases, you can put an outstation on the other side of the run. In order to prevent the sheep straying beyond your boundaries, keep ever hovering at a distance round them, so far off that they shall not be disturbed by your presence, and even be ignorant that you are looking at them.

sheep cannot be too closely watched or too much left to themselves you must remember they are your masters and not you theirs you exist for them not they for you if you bear this well in mind you will be able to turn the tables on them effectually at shearing time but if once you begin to make the sheep suit their feeding hours to your convenience you may as well give up sheep-farming at once you will soon find the mob begin to look poor

your percentage of lambs will fall off and in fact you will have to pay very heavily for saving your own trouble as indeed would be the case in every occupation you might adopt of course you will have to turn your sheep back when they approach the boundary of your neighbor be ready then at the boundary you have been watching them creeping up in a large semicircle toward the forbidden ground

As long as they are on their own run, let them alone. Give them not a moment's anxiety of mind, but directly they reach the boundary. Show yourself with your dog in your most terrific aspect. Startle them, frighten them, disturb their peace. Do so again and again at the same spot from the very first day. Let them always have peace on their own run and none anywhere off it.

in a month or two you will find the sheep begin to understand your meaning and it will then be very easy work to keep them within bounds if however you suffer them to have half an hour now and then on the forbidden territory they will be constantly making for it the chances are that the feed is good on or about the boundary and they will be seduced by this to cross and go on and on till they are quite beyond your control you will have burnt a large patch of feed on the outset

burn it in early spring on a day when rain appears to be at hand it is dangerous to burn too much at once a large fire may run farther than you wish and being no respecter of imaginary boundaries will cross on to your neighbor's run without compunction and without regard to his sheep and then heavy damages will be brought against you burn however you must so do it carefully

light one strip first and keep putting it out by beating it with leafy branches this will form a fireproof boundary between you and your neighbor burnt feed means contented and well-conditioned sheep the delantly green and juicy grass which springs up after burning is far better for sheep than the rank and dry growth of summer after it has been withered by the winter's frosts your sheep will not ramble for if they have plenty of burnt pasture they are contented where they are

They feed in the morning, bunch themselves together in clusters during the heat of the day, and feed again at night. Moreover, on burnt pasture, no fire can come down upon you from your neighbor so as to hurt your sheep. The day will come when you will have no more occasion for burning, when your run will be fully stopped, and the sheep will keep your feed so closely cropped

that it will do without it it is certainly a mortification to see volumes of smoke rising into the air and to know that all that smoke might have been wool and might have been sold by you for two shillings a pound in england you will think it great waste and regret that you have not more sheep to eat it however that will come to pass in time and meanwhile if you have not mouths enough upon your run to make wool of it you must burn it off and make smoke of it instead

there is sure to be a good deal of rough scrub and brushwood on the run which is better destroyed and which sheep would not touch therefore for the ultimate value of your run it is well or better that it should be fired than fed off the very first work to be done after your arrival will be to make a yard for your sheep make this large enough to hold five or six times as many sheep as you possess at first it may be square in shape

place two good large gates at the middle of either of the two opposite sides this will be sufficient at first but as your flocks increase a somewhat more complicated arrangement will be desirable the sheep we will suppose are to be thoroughly overhauled you wish for some reason to inspect their case fully yourself or you must tail your lambs in which case every lamb has to be caught and you will cut its tail off and earmark it with your own ear-mark

or again you will see fit to draft out all the lambs that are ready for weaning, or you may wish to cull the mob and sell off the worst wooled sheep, or your neighbor's sheep may have joined with yours, or for many other reasons it is necessary that your flock should be closely examined. Without good yards it is impossible to do this well. They are an essential of the highest importance.

Select, then, a site as dry and stony as possible, for your sheep will have to be put into the yard overnight, and at daylight in the morning set to work. Fill the yard B with sheep from the big yard A. The yard B we will suppose to hold about 600. Fill C from B. C shall hold about 100. When the sheep are in that small yard C, which is called the drafting yard,

you can overhaul them and your men can catch the lambs and hold them up to you over the rail of the yard to ear mark and tail there being but one hundred sheep in the yard you can easily run your eye over them should you be drafting out sheep or taking your rams out let the sheep which you are taking out be let into the yards d and e

or it may be you are drafting two different sorts of sheep at once. Then there will be two yards in which to put them. When you have done with the small mob, let it out into yard F, taking the tally of the sheep as they pass through the gate. This gate therefore must be a small one, so as not to admit more than one or two at a time. It would be tedious work filling a small yard C from the big one A,

for in that large space the sheep will run about and it will take you some few minutes every time from the smaller yard b however c will be easily filled among the other advantages of good yards there is none greater than the time saved this is of the highest importance for the ewes will be hungry and their lambs will have sucked them dry and then as soon as they are turned out of the yards the mothers will race off after feed and the lambs being weak will lag behind

and the merino ewe being a bad mother the two may never meet again and the lamb will die therefore it is essential to begin work of this sort early in the morning and to have yards so constructed as to cause as little loss of time as possible i will not say that the plan given above is the very best that could be devised but it is common out here and answers all practical purposes the weakest point is in the approach to b from a

as soon as you have done with the mob let them out they will race off helter-skelter to feed and soon be spread out in an ever-widening fan-like shape therefore have some one stationed a good way off to check their first burst

and stay them from going too far and leaving their lambs after a while as you sit telescope in hand you will see the ewes come bleating back to the yards for their lambs they have satisfied the first cravings of their hunger and their motherly feelings are beginning to return

Now, if the sheep have not been kept a little together, the lambs may have gone off after the ewes, and some few will then pretty certainly never be able to find their mothers again. It is rather a pretty sight to sit on a bank and watch the ewes coming back. There is sure to be a mob of good many lambs sticking near the yards, and ewe after ewe will come back and rush up affectionately to one lamb after another. A good few will try to palm themselves off upon her.

if she is young and foolish she will be for a short time in doubt if she is older and wiser she will butt away the little impostors with her head but they are very importunate and will stick to her for a long while at last however she finds her true child and is comforted

she kisses its nose and tail with the most affectionate fondness and soon the lost lamb is seen helping himself lustily and frolicking with his tail in the height of his contentment i have known however many cunning lambs make a practice of thieving from the more inexperienced ewes though they have mothers of their own and i remember one very beautiful and favourite lamb of mine who to my great sorrow lost its mother but kept itself alive in this manner

and throve and grew up to be a splendid sheep by mere roguery such a case is an exception not a rule you may perhaps wonder how you are to know that your sheep are all right and that none get away you cannot be quite certain of this

you may be pretty sure however for you will soon have a large number of sheep with whom you are personally acquainted and who have from time to time forced themselves upon your attention either by peculiar beauty or peculiar ugliness or by having certain marks upon them you will have a black sheep or two and probably a long-tailed one or two and a sheep with only one eye and another with a wart on its nose and so forth

These will be your marked sheep, and if you find all of them you may be satisfied that the rest are safe also. Your eye will soon become very accurate in telling you the number of a mob of sheep. When sheep are lambing they should not be disturbed. You cannot meddle with a mob of lambing ewes without doing them mischief. Some one or two lambs, or perhaps many more, will be lost every time you disturb the flock.

the young sheep until they have had their lambs a few days and learnt their value will leave them upon the slightest provocation then there is a serious moral injury inflicted upon the ewe she becomes familiar with the crime of infanticide and will be apt to leave her next lamb as carelessly as her first if however she has once reared a lamb she will be fond of the next and when old will face anything even a dog for the sake of her child

when therefore the sheep are lambing you must ride or walk farther around and notice any tracks you may see anything rather than disturb the sheep they must always lamb on burnt or green feed and against the best boundary you have and then there will be less occasion to touch them besides the yards above described you will want one or two smaller ones for getting the sheep into the woolshed at shearing time and you will also want a small yard for branding

The wool shed is a roomy covered building with a large central space and an aisle-like partition on each side. These last will be for holding the sheep during the night. The shearers will want to begin with daylight and the dew will not yet be off the wool if the sheep are exposed. If wool is packed damp, it will heat and spoil. Therefore, a sufficient number of sheep must be left undercover through the night to last the shearers till the dew is off.

in a woolshed the aisles would be called scylians once the name is derived i know not nor whether it has two aisles in it or one all the sheep go into the scylians the shear is sheer in the centre which is large enough to leave room for the wool to be stowed away at one end

the shearers pull the sheep out of the skillions as they want them each picks the worst sheep i e that with the least wool upon it that happens to be at hand at the time trying to put the best wooled sheep which are consequently the hardest to shear upon someone else and so the heaviest wooled and largest sheep get shorn the last a good man will shear one hundred sheep in a day some even more but one hundred is reckoned good work

i have known one hundred and ninety-five sheep to be shorn by one man in a day but i fancy these must have been from an old and bare mob and that this number of well wooled sheep would be quite beyond one man's power sheep are not shorn so neatly as at home but supposing a man has a mob of twenty thousand

he must get the wool off their backs as best he can without carping at an occasional snip from a sheep's carcass if the wool is taken close off and only now and then a sheep snipped there will be no cause to complain then follows the drying of the wool to port and the bullocks come in for their full share of work it is a pleasant sight to see the first load of wool start down but a far pleasanter to see the dray returning from its last trip

Shearing well over will be a weight off your mind. This is your most especially busy and anxious time of year, and when the wool is safely down, you will be glad indeed. It may be a matter of question with you, shall I wash my sheep before shearing or not?

if you wash them at all you should do it thoroughly and take considerable pains to have them clean otherwise you had better shear in the grease i e not washed wool in the grease weighs about one-third heavier and consequently fetches a lower price in the market when wool falls moreover the fall tells first upon greasy wool still many shear in the grease and some consider it pays them better to do so

It is a mooted point, but the general opinion is in favor of washing. As soon as you have put up one yard, you may set to work upon a hut for yourself and men. This you will make of split wooden slabs set upright in the ground and nailed onto a wall plate. You will first plant large posts at each of the corners, and one at either side of every door, and four for the chimney.

at the top of these you will set your wall plates to the wall plates you will nail your slabs on the inside of the slabs you will nail light rods of wood and plaster them over with mud having first however put up the roof and thatched it three or four men will have split the stuff and put up the hut in a fortnight we will suppose it to be about eighteen feet by twelve

"'By and by, as you grow richer, "'you may burn bricks at your leisure "'and eventually build a brick house. "'At first, however, you must rough it. "'You will set about a garden at once. "'You will bring up fowls at once. "'Pigs may wait till you have time to put up a regular sty "'and to have grown potatoes enough to feed them. "'Two fat and well-tended pigs are worth half a dozen, "'half-starved wretches.'

such neglected brutes make a place look very untidy and their existence will be a burden to themselves and an eyesore to you in a year or two you will find yourself very comfortable you will get a little fruit from your garden in summer and will have a prospect of much more you will have cows and plenty of butter and milk and eggs you will have pigs and if you choose it bees

plenty of vegetables and in fact may live upon the fat of the land with very little trouble and almost as little expense if you grudge this your fare will be rather unvaried and will consist solely of tea mutton bread and possibly potatoes for the first year these are all you must expect the second will improve matters and the third should see you surrounded with luxuries if you are your own shepherd which at first is more than probable

You will find that shepherding is one of the most prosaic professions you could have adopted. Sheep will be the one idea in your mind, and as for poetry, nothing will be farther from your thoughts. Your eye will ever be straining after a distant sheep, your ears listening for a bleat. In fact, your whole attention will be directed, the whole day long, to nothing but your flock. Were you to shepherd too long, your wits would certainly go wool-gathering, even if you were not tempted to bleat.

it is however a gloriously healthy employment and now gentle reader i wish you luck with your run if you have tolerably good fortune in a very short time you will be a rich man hoping that this may be the case there remains nothing for me but to wish you heartily farewell crossing the rangitata suppose you were to ask your way from mr phillips's station to mine i should direct you thus work your way towards yonder mountain

pass underneath it between it and the lake having the mountain on your right hand and the lake on your left if you come upon any swamps go round them or if you think you can go through them if you get stuck up by any creeks a creek is the colonial term for a stream you'll very likely see cattle marks by following the creek up and down but there is nothing there that ought to stick you up if you keep out of the big swamp at the bottom of the valley

After passing that mountain, follow the lake till it ends, keeping well on the hillside above it, and make the end of the valley, where you will come upon a high terrace above a large gully, with a very strong creek at the bottom of it. Get down the terrace, where you'll see a patch of burnt ground, and follow the riverbed till it opens onto a flat. Turn to your left and keep down the mountainsides that run along the Rangitata.

keep well near them and so avoid the swamps cross the rangatata opposite where you see a large river-bed coming into it from the other side and follow this river-bed till you see my hut some eight miles up it perhaps i have thus been better able to describe the nature of the travelling than by any other if one can get anything that can be manufactured into a feature and be dignified with a name once in five or six miles one is very lucky

well we had followed these directions for some way as far in fact as the terrace when the river coming into full view i saw that the rangitada was very high worse than that i saw mr phillips and a party of men who were taking a dray over to a run just on the other side of the river and who had been prevented from crossing for ten days by the state of the water

"'Among them, to my horror, I recognized my cadet, whom I had left behind me with beef, which he was to have taken over to my place a week and more back, whereon my mind misgave me that a poor Irishman who had been left alone at my place might be in a sore plight, having been left with no meat and no human being within reach for a period of ten days. "'I don't think I should have attempted crossing the river but for this.'

under the circumstances however i determined at once on making a push for it and accordingly taking my two cadets with me and the unfortunate beef that was already putrescent it had lain on the ground in a sack all the time we started along under the hills and got opposite the place where i intended crossing by about three o'clock i had climbed the mountain-side and surveyed the river from thence before approaching the river itself

at last we were by the water's edge of course i led the way being as it were patronus of the expedition and having been out some four months longer than either of my companions

Still, having never crossed any of the rivers on horseback in a fresh, having never seen the Rangitata in a fresh, and being utterly unable to guess how deep any stream would take me, it may be imagined that I felt a certain amount of caution to be necessary, and accordingly, folding my watch in my pocket-handkerchief, and tying it round my neck in case of having to swim for it unexpectedly, I strictly forbade the other two to stir from the bank,

until they saw me safely on the other side. Not that I intended to let my horse swim. In fact, I had made up my mind to let my old Irishman wait a little longer rather than deliberately swim for it. My two companions were worse mounted than I was, and the rushing water might only too probably affect their heads. Mine had already become quite indifferent to it, though it had not been so at first.

these two men however had been only a week in the settlement and i should have deemed myself highly culpable had i allowed them to swim a river on horseback though i am sure both would have been ready to do so if occasion required as i said before at last we were on the water's edge a rushing stream some sixty yards wide was the first instalment of our passage it was about the colour and consistency of cream and soot and how deep

i had not the remotest idea the only thing for it was to go in and see so choosing a spot just above a spit and a rapid at such spots there is sure to be a ford if there is a ford anywhere i walked my mare quickly into it having perfect confidence in her

and I believe she having more confidence in me than some who have known me in England might suppose. In we went. In the middle of the stream the water was only a little over her belly. She is sixteen hands high. A little farther, by sitting back on my saddle and lifting my feet up, I might have avoided getting them wet, had I cared to do so, but I was more intent on having the mare well in hand, and on studying the appearance of the remainder of the stream,

than on thinking of my own feet just then after that the water grew shallower rapidly and i soon had the felicity of landing my mare on the shelving shingle of the opposite bank so far so good i beckoned to my companions who speedily followed and we all then proceeded down the spit in search of a good crossing place over the next stream we were soon beside it and very ugly it looked it must have been at least a hundred yards broad i think more

but water is so deceptive that i dare not affix any certain width i was soon in it advancing very slowly above a slightly darker line in the water which assured me of its being shallow for some little way this failing i soon found myself descending into deeper water first over my boots for some yards then over the top of my gaiters for some yards more

this continued so long that i was in hopes of being able to get entirely over when suddenly the knee against which the stream came was entirely wet and the water was rushing so furiously past me that my poor mare was leaning over tremendously already she had begun to snort as horses do when they are swimming

and I knew well that my companions would have to swim for it, even though I myself might have got through. So I very gently turned her head round downstream, and quietly made back again for the bank which I had left.

she had got nearly to the shore and i could again detect a darker line in the water which was now not over her knees when all of a sudden down she went up to her belly in a quicksand in which she began floundering about in fine style i was off her back and into the water that she had left in less time than it takes to write this

I should not have thought of leaving her back unless sure of my ground, for it is a cannon in river crossing to stick to your horse. I pulled her gently out and followed up the dark line to the shore, where my two friends were only too glad to receive me. By the way, all this time I had had a companion in the shape of a cat in a bag, which I was taking over to my place as an antidote to the rats, which were most unpleasantly abundant there.

i nursed her on the pommel of my saddle all through this last stream and save in the episode of the quicksand she had not been in the least wet then however she did drop in for a sousing and mewed in a manner that went to my heart i am very fond of cats and this one is a particularly favourable specimen it was with great pleasure that i heard her purring through the bag as soon as i was again mounted and had her in front of me as before

So I failed to cross this stream there, but determined, if possible, to get across the river and see whether the Irishman was alive or dead. We turned higher up the stream and by and by found a place where it divided. By carefully selecting a spot, I was able to cross the first stream without the waters getting higher than my saddle flaps, and the second scarcely over the horse's belly. After that, there were two streams somewhat similar to the first.

and then the dangers of the passage of the river might be considered as accomplished the dangers but not the difficulties these consisted in the sluggish creeks and swampy ground thickly overgrown with irishmen snow-grass and spaniard which extend on either side of the river for half a mile or more but to cut a long story short we got over these two and then we were on the shingly river bed which leads up to the spot on which my hut is made and my house making

this river was now a brawling torrent hardly less dangerous to cross than the rangitata itself though containing not a tithe of the water the boulders are so large and the water so powerful in its ordinary condition it is little more than a large brook now though not absolutely fresh it was as unpleasant a place to put a horse into as one need wish there was nothing for it however and we crossed and recrossed it four times without misadventure

and finally with great pleasure i perceived a twinkling light on the terrace where the hut was which assured me at once that the old irishman was still in the land of the living two or three vigorous coo ees brought him down to the side of the creek which bounds my run upon one side

End of chapter 10, which is section 11. End of a first year in Canterbury settlement by Samuel Butler. With the American Express Gold Card, I can earn four times membership rewards points at U.S. supermarkets. So with all these groceries, I'm also getting points. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash U.S. slash explore dash gold. Terms and points cap apply.