elves quite so seriously as
some of their neighbours. The English gentleman has a fund of cheery
adaptiveness which often carries him through Colonial life abreast of
graver competitors. So the settler who built a loaf of station-bread
into the earthen wall of his house, alleging that it was the hardest
and most durable material he could procure, did not, we may believe,
find a sense of humour encumber him in the troubles of a settler's
life. For there were troubles. The pastoral provinces were no
Dresden-china Arcadia. Nature is very stubborn in the wilderness, even
in the happier climes, where she offers, for the most part, merely a
passive resistance. An occasional storm or flood was about her
only outburst of active opposition in South-eastern New Zealand.
Nevertheless, an educated European who finds himself standing in an
interminable plain or on a windy hillside where nothing has been done,
where he is about to begin that work of reclaiming the desert which
has been going on in Europe for thousands of years, and of which
the average civilized man is the calm, self-satisfied, unconscious
inheritor, finds that he must shift his point of view! The
nineteenth-century Briton face to face with the conditions of
primitive man is a spectacle fine in the general, but often ludicrous
or piteous in the particular. The loneliness, the coarseness, the
everlasting insistence of the pettiest and most troublesome wants and
difficulties, harden and brace many minds, but narrow most and torment
some. Wild game, song-birds, fish, forest trees, were but some of the
things of which there were few or none round nearly all the young
pastoral settlements. Everything was to make. The climate might be
healthy and the mountain outlines noble. But nothing but work, and
successful work, could reconcile an educated and imaginative man to
the monotony of a daily outlook over league after league of stony
soil, thinly clothed by pallid, wiry tussocks bending under an
eternal, uncompromising wind; where the only living creatures in sight
might often be small lizards or a twittering grey bird miscalled a
lark; or where the only sound, save the wind aforesaid, might be
the ring of his horse's shoe against a stone, or the bleat of a
dull-coated merino, scarcely distinguishable from the dull plain round
it. To cure an unfit new-comer, dangerously enamoured of the
romance of colonization, few experiences could surpass a week of
sheep-driving, where lif