sticking up" having broken out on the west land. I
fear my expressions are often unintelligible to an English reader,
but in this instance I will explain. "Sticking up" is merely a concise
colonial rendering of "Your money or your life," and was originally
employed by Australian bushrangers, those terrible freebooters whose
ranks used to be always recruited from escaped convicts. Fortunately we
had no community of that class, only a few prisoners kept in a little
ricketty wooden house in Christchurch, from which an enterprising baby
might easily have escaped. I dare say as we get more civilized out
there, we shall build ourselves handsome prisons and penitentiaries; but
in those early days a story was current of a certain jailor who let all
his captives out on some festal occasion, using the tremendous threat,
that whoever had not returned by eight o'clock should be "_locked out!_"

But to return to that particular winter evening. We had been telling
each other stories which we had heard or read of bushranging exploits,
until we were all as nervous as possible. Ghosts, or even burglar
stories, are nothing to the horror of a true bushranger story, and
F---- had made himself particularly ghastly and disagreeable by giving a
minute account of an adventure which had been told to him by one of the
survivors.

We listened, with the wind howling outside, to F----'s horrid
second-hand story, of how one fine day up country, eight or ten
men,--station hands,--were "stuck up" by one solitary bushranger, armed
to the teeth. He tied them up one by one, and seated them all on a bench
in the sun, and deliberately fired at and wounded the youngest of the
party; then, seized with compunction, he unbound one of the captives,
and stood over him, revolver in hand, whilst he saddled and mounted a
horse, to go for a doctor to set the poor boy's broken leg. Before
the messenger had gone "a league, a league, but barely twa',"--the
freebooter recollected that he might bring somebody else back with him
besides the doctor, and flinging himself across his horse, rode after
the affrighted man, and coolly shot him dead. I really don't know how
the story ended: I believe everybody perished; but at this juncture
I declared it to be impossible to sit up any longer to listen to such
tragedies, and went to bed.

Exactly at midnight,--the proper hour for ghosts; burglars, and
bushrangers, and such "small deer" to be about, everybody was awakened
simult