s agent went out to New Zealand,
partly in search of health and partly with the honourable ambition
to found a colony worthy of England. He made a strong administrator.
Their Earl and their Bishop soon fled from the hard facts of pioneer
life, but the Pilgrims as a rule were made of sterner stuff, and
sticking to their task, they soon spread over the yellow, sunny
plains, high-terraced mountain valleys, and wind-swept hillsides of
their province. Their territory was better suited than Otago for the
first stages of settlement, and for thirty years its progress was
remarkable.

[Footnote 1: It was when he was at this work that Dr. Garnett pictures
him so vividly--"the sanguine, enthusiastic projector, fertile,
inventive creator, his head an arsenal of expedients and every failure
pregnant with a remedy, imperious or suasive as suits his turn;
terrible in wrath or exuberant in affection; commanding, exhorting,
entreating, as like an eminent personage of old he

"With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way,
And swims, or wades, or sinks, or creeps, or flies."]

On the surface there were certain differences between the Canterbury
colonists and those of Otago, which local feeling intensified in a
manner always paltry, though sometimes amusing. When the stiff-backed
Free-Churchmen who were to colonize Otago gathered on board the
emigrant ship which was to take them across the seas, they opened
their psalm-books. Their minister, like Burns' cottar, "waled a
portion wi' judicious care," and the Puritans, slowly chanting on,
rolled out the appeal to the God of Bethel:--

"God of our fathers, be the God
of their succeeding race!"

Such men and women might not be amusing fellow-passengers on a four
months' sea-voyage,--and, indeed, there is reason to believe that they
were not,--but settlers made of such stuff were not likely to fail in
the hard fight with Nature at the far end of the earth; and they did
not fail. The Canterbury Pilgrims, on the other hand, bade farewell
to old England by dancing at a ball. In their new home they did not
renounce their love of dancing, though their ladies had sometimes to
be driven in a bullock-dray to the door of the ballroom, and stories
are told of young gentlemen, enthusiastic waltzers, riding on
horseback to the happy scene clad in evening dress and with coat-tails
carefully pinned up. But the Canterbury folk did not, on the whole,
make worse settlers for not taking thems