e became a prolonged crawl at the heels of a
slow, dusty, greasy-smelling "mob" straggling along at a maximum pace
of two miles an hour. If patience and a good collie helped the tyro
through that ordeal, such allies were quite too feeble to be of
service in the supreme trial of bullock-driving, where a long whip and
a vocabulary copious beyond the dreams of Englishmen were the only
effective helpers known to man in the management of the clumsy dray
and the eight heavy-yoked, lumbering beasts dragging it. Wonderful
tales are told of cultivated men in the wilderness, Oxonians disguised
as station-cooks, who quoted Virgil over their dish-washing or asked
your opinion on a tough passage of Thucydides whilst baking a batch of
bread. Most working settlers, as a matter of fact, did well enough
if they kept up a running acquaintance with English literature; and
station-cooks, as a race, were ever greater at grog than at Greek.

Prior to about 1857 there was little or no intercourse between the
various settlements. Steamers and telegraphs had not yet appeared. The
answer to a letter sent from Cook's Straits to Auckland might come
in seven weeks or might not. It would come in seventy hours now.
Despatches were sometimes sent from Wellington to Auckland _via_
Sydney, to save time. In 1850 Sir William Fox and Mr. Justice Chapman
took six days to sail across Cook's Straits from Nelson to Wellington,
a voyage which now occupies eight hours. They were passengers in the
Government brig, a by-word for unseaworthiness and discomfort. In this
vessel the South Island members of the first New Zealand parliament
spent nearly nine weeks in beating up the coast to the scene of
their labours in Auckland. But the delight with which the coming of
steamships in the fifties was hailed was not so much a rejoicing over
more regular coastal communication, as joy because the English Mail
would come sooner and oftener. How they did wait and watch for the
letters and newspapers from Home, those exiles of the early days!
Lucky did they count themselves if they had news ten times a year, and
not more than four months old. One of the best of their stories is of
a certain lover whose gallant grace was not unworthy a courtier
of Queen Elizabeth. One evening this swain, after securing at the
post-office his treasured mail budget, was escorting his lady-love
home through the muddy, ill-lighted streets of little Christchurch.
A light of some sort was needed at a