usness.

Pork--fresh and salted, bacon and ham--is the natural and invariable
food of the settler. Beef and mutton are too valuable as marketable
steers, dairy cattle, and wool-growers, and are not so conveniently
prepared into keeping forms; hence the pigs he breeds on his clearings
are looked upon by the bush-farmer as the regular source whence to draw
his household provision in the meat way. Now, if the wild boars out of
the bush get among the brood sows upon the clearings, the result is
deplorably manifest in the next generation, which will display more or
less of the evil characteristics of the wild race. Thus, both the older
farmer and the newest settler are nearly touched, and both unite in a
common warfare with the enemy.

It is often possible to stalk down and to shoot individual wild pigs on
open ground, but that is looked upon merely as a cheerful interlude of
sport; it has no deterrent or scaring effect upon the bulk of the
droves, and is a waste of time, so far as regards the clearance of a
district. A grand and well-organized drive, such as that we are about to
see, will often result in not a single wild pig being visible in the
district for six months and more afterwards. It is good sport, too; very
arduous, since the hunter has to run and scramble through miles of
forest. It has in it a good spice of danger, such as Britons love, and
is, on the whole, pretty popular. Pig-hunting may be described as a sort
of national sport in New Zealand.

But here is Old Colonial issuing from the shanty, and a start seems
imminent. The plan of campaign has been arranged between him and Mihake
Tekerahi, the Maori, and another settler from a neighbouring river. The
straggling groups of men and dogs are divided into three bodies, two of
which will proceed to right and left respectively, and the third will go
directly "back" from the farm. All the parties will become subdivided
into smaller gangs, in the course of the day, but all will converge upon
a given point in the bush, which will be the limit of the hunt.

The block of land on which we are lies between three large rivers, and,
owing to the conformation of the country and the winding of the rivers,
its fourth side is a narrow neck of land not more than a mile and a half
wide. Here there is a very lofty and rugged range, and it is the spot
agreed on as our final rendezvous, being some fifteen miles distant from
our shanty.

Besides the men who have met at the farm