d-servants, he would not do for the hardest words which ever came out
of a boss's mouth. There are also strict rules of honesty observed among
these men, and if one swagger were to purloin the smallest article from
a station which had fed and sheltered him, every other swagger in all
the country side would immediately become an amateur detective to make
the thief give up his spoil. A pair of old boots was once missing from
a neighbouring station, and suspicion fell upon a swagger. Justice was
perhaps somewhat tardy in this instance, as it rested entirely in the
hands of every tramp who passed that way; but at the end of some
months the boots were found at home, and the innocence of the swaggers,
individually and collectively, triumphantly established.

The only instance of harshness to a swagger which came under my notice
during three years residence in New Zealand, is the one I have alluded
to above, and contains so much dramatic interest in its details, that it
may not be out of place here.

Although I have naturally dwelt in these papers more upon our bright
sunny weather, our clear, bracing winter days, and our balmy spring and
autumn evenings, let no intending traveller think that he will not meet
with bad weather at the Antipodes! I can only repeat what I have said
with pen and voice a hundred times before. New Zealand possesses a very
capricious and disagreeable climate: disagreeable from its constant
high winds: but it is perhaps the most singularly and remarkably healthy
place in the world. This must surely arise from the very gales which I
found so trying to my temper, for damp is a word without meaning; as for
mildew or miasma, the generation who are growing up there will not
know the meaning of the words; and in spite of a warm, bright day often
turning at five minutes warning into a snowy or wet afternoon, colds and
coughs are almost unknown. People who go out there with delicate lungs
recover in the most surprising manner; surprising, because one expects
the sudden changes of temperature, the unavoidable exposure to rain and
even snow, to kill instead of curing invalids. But the practice is very
unlike the theory in this case, and people thrive where they ought to
die.

During my first winter in Canterbury we had only one week of _really_
bad weather, but I felt at that time as if I had never realized before
what bad weather meant. A true "sou'-wester" was blowing from the
first to the second Monday in t