Station Amusements | Page 5

he plodded on diligently, never got beyond
the simplest words in the largest type. Small print puzzled him at once,
and he had a habit of standing or sitting with his back to me whilst

repeating his lessons. Nothing would induce him to face me. The
moment it became his turn to go on with the chapter out of the Bible,
with which we commenced our studies, that instant he turned his broad
shoulders towards me, and I could only, hear the faintest murmurs
issuing from the depths of a great beard. Remonstrance would have
scared my shy pupil away, so I was fain to put up with his own method
of instruction.
But this is a digression, and I want to make you see with my eyes the
beautiful glimpses of distant country lying around the bold wooded
cliff on which we were standing. The ground fell away from our feet so
completely in some places, that we could see over the tops of the high
trees around us, whilst in others the landscape appeared framed in an
arch of quivering foliage. A noisy little creek chattered and babbled as
it hurried along to join its big brother down below, and kept a fringe of
exquisite ferns, which grew along its banks, brightly green by its
moisture. Each tree, if taken by itself, was more like an umbrella than
anything else to English eyes, for in these primitive forests, where no
kind pruning hand has ever touched them, they shoot up, straight and
branchless, into the free air above, where they spread a leafy crown out
to the sunbeams. Beneath the dense shade of these matted branches
grew a luxuriant shrubbery, whose every leaf was a marvel of delicate
beauty, and ferns found here a home such as they might seek elsewhere
in vain. Flowers were very rare, and I did not observe many berries, but
these conditions vary in different parts of the beautiful middle island.
That was a fair and fertile land stretching out before us, intersected by
the deep banks of the Rakaia, with here and there a tiny patch of
emerald green and a white dot, representing the house and English
grass paddock of a new settler. In the background the bush-covered
mountains rose ever higher and higher in bolder outline, till they shook
off their leafy clothing, and stood out in steep cliffs and scaurs from the
snow-clad glacier region of the mountain range running from north to
south, and forming the back bone of the island. I may perhaps make
you see the yellow, river-furrowed plains, and the great confusion of
rising ground behind them, but cannot make you see, still less feel, the
atmosphere around, quivering in a summer haze in the valley beneath,
and stirred to the faintest summer wind-sighs as it moved among the
pines and birches overhead. Its lightness was its most striking

peculiarity. You felt as if your lungs could never weary of inhaling
deep breaths of such an air. Warm without oppression, cool without a
chill. I can find nothing but paradoxes to describe it. As for fatigue,
one's muscles might get tired, and need rest, but the usual depression
and weariness attending over-exertion could not exist in such an
atmosphere. One felt like a happy child; pleased at nothing, content to
exist where existence was a pleasure.
You could not find more favourable specimens of New Zealand
colonists than the two men, Trew and Domville, who stood before us in
their working dress of red flannel shirts and moleskin trousers,
"Cookham" boots and digger's plush hats. Three years before this day
they had landed at Port Lyttleton, with no other capital than their strong,
willing arms, and their sober, sensible heads. Very different is their
appearance to-day from what it was on their arrival; and the change in
their position and circumstances is as great. Their bodily frames have
filled out and developed under the influence of the healthy climate and
abundance of mutton, until they look ten years younger and twice as
strong, and each man owns a cottage and twenty acres of freehold land,
at which he works in spare time, as well as having more pounds than he
ever possessed pence in the old country, put safely away in the bank.
There can be no doubt about the future of any working man or woman
in our New Zealand colonies. It rests in their own hands, under God's
blessing, and the history of the whole human race shows us that He
always has blessed honest labour and rightly directed efforts to do our
duty in this world. Sobriety and industry are the first essentials to
success. Possessing these moral qualifications, and a pair of hands, a
man may rear up his children in those beautiful