iving very quietly and happily on a small compact sheep-farm, at the
foot of the Malvern Hills, in the province of Canterbury, New Zealand.
As runs went, its dimensions were small indeed; for we only measured
it at 12,000 acres, all told. The great tidal wave of prosperity, which
sets once in a while towards the shores of all colonies, had that year
swelled and risen to its full force; but this we did not know. Borne
aloft upon its unsubstantial crest we could not, from that giddy height,
discern any water-valleys of adversity or clouds of change and
storm along the shining horizon of the new world around us. All our
calculations were based on the assumption that the existing prices for
sheep, wool, cattle, and all farm-produce, would rule for many a long
day; and the delightful part of this royal road to wealth was, that its
travellers need not exert themselves in any way: they had only to sit
still with folded hands whilst their sheep increased, and it was well
known that a flock doubled itself in three short years. The obvious
deduction from this agreeable numerical fact was, that in an equally
short period your agent's payments to your bank account would also be
doubled. In the meantime the drays were busy carting the wool to the
seaports as fast as they could be loaded, whilst speculative drovers
rode all about the country buying up the fat cattle and wethers from
every run. These were wanted to supply the West Coast Diggings which had
just "broken out" (as the curious phrase goes there), and so was every
description of grain and dairy produce.

We squatters were not the only inhabitants of this fool's paradise. The
local Government began planning extensive works: railways were laid
out in every direction, bridges planned across rivers, which proved
the despair of engineers; whilst a tunnel, the wonder of the Southern
Hemisphere, was commenced through a range of hills lying between Port
Lyttleton and Christchurch. All this work was undertaken on a scale of
pay which made the poor immigrants who thronged to the place by every
ship, rub their eyes and believe they must be dreaming, and that they
would presently wake up and find themselves back again in the old
country, at the old starvation rate of wages. Small capitalists, with
perhaps only one or two hundred pounds in the world, bid against each
other as purchasers of quarter-acre sections in the fast-springing
townships, or of fifty-acre lots of arable land in the