None imagined that his connection with the Islands would not terminate
for half a century, and that the good and evil of his work therein
would be such as must be directly felt--to use his own pet phrase--by
unborn millions in distant days.

Chapter XIII

THE PASTORAL PROVINCES

"Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full
Out of their choicest and their whitest wool."

The Company's settlements were no longer confined to the shores of
Cook's Straits. In 1846, Earl Grey, formerly Lord Howick, came to the
Colonial Office, and set himself to compensate the Company for former
official hostility. He secured for it a loan of L250,000, and handed
over to it large blocks of land in the South Island, which--less
certain reserves--was in process of complete purchase from its handful
of Maori owners. The Company, gaining thus a new lease of life, went
to work. In 1848 and 1850 that was done which ought to have been done
a decade sooner, and the void spaces of Otago and Canterbury were
made the sites of settlements of a quasi-religious kind. The Otago
settlement was the outcome of the Scottish Disruption; its pioneers
landed in March, 1848. They were a band of Free Kirk Presbyterians,
appropriately headed by a Captain Cargill, a Peninsular veteran and a
descendant of Donald Cargill, and by the Rev. Thomas Burns, a minister
of sterling worth, who was a nephew of the poet. Otago has this year
celebrated her jubilee, and the mayor of her chief city, Captain
Cargill's son, is the first citizen of a town of nearly 50,000
inhabitants which in energy and beauty is worthy of its name--Dunedin.
For years, however, the progress of the young settlement was slow.
Purchasers of its land at the "sufficient price"--L2 an acre--were
provokingly few, so few indeed that the regulation price had to be
reduced. It had no Maori troubles worth speaking of, but the hills
that beset its site, rugged and bush-covered, were troublesome to
clear and settle, the winter climate is bleaker than that of northern
or central New Zealand, and a good deal of Scottish endurance and
toughness was needed before the colonists won their way through to the
more fertile and open territory which lay waiting for them, both on
their right hand and on their left, in the broad province of Otago.
Like General Grant in his last campaign, they had to keep on "pegging
away," and they did. They stood stoutly by their kirk, and gave it a
valuable endowment of