refer to the
forests were free to all settlers for their home needs on the payment of
a nominal fee to the Provincial Government.

The timber in due time was felled, cut up, and carted to the station,
and we removed our camp to the site of the operations. It was a bleak,
wild place, three miles from the south mail track, and consisted only of
a small slab hut or two with a wool shed and sheep yards. The owner, Mr.
T. Moorhouse, had lately purchased the run, and was about to improve and
reside on it. A description of our life here would not be interesting,
so I will pass over three months during which we worked steadily and the
buildings were nearly complete, when one day, as I was nailing the
shingles on a roof under a powerful sun, I suddenly felt sick and giddy,
and was obliged to go inside and lie down. The same evening I developed
a severe attack of gastric fever which three days after turned to a
kind of brain fever, and for nigh on six weeks I lay betwixt life and
death. For half of this time I lay on the floor in a corner of the new
building, the bare ground with a layer of tea leaves for my bed, the
noise grinding into my brain when I was at all conscious, and only
Metcalfe (good man that he was) with an old Scottish shepherd to look
after me when they could find time to do so. No doctor, medicine, or
attendance of any kind was procurable nearer than sixty miles away, with
a weekly post. One night, to make me sleep they gave me laudanum (a
bottle of which Metcalfe had with him for toothache) and the following
morning I was discovered standing on the brink of an artificial pond
nearly a quarter of a mile off, barefoot and half naked, to reach which
I must have walked over places I could not easily have passed in my
senses. This was when the brain attack came on, and for a week I lay, I
was told, almost unconscious. Metcalfe contrived to send some
information to Christchurch, and after I had been down for over three
weeks Moorhouse arrived and removed me to his own hut, where he looked
after me for some time. Then he had me carried to and fixed up in his
dog cart and drove me sixty miles over the plains in a single day to
Christchurch, where I arrived a good bit more dead than alive, but to
find a comfortable room, and every attendance and luxury a sick man
could wish for, prepared for me by my good friends Mr. and Mrs. Gresson.
I must have taken a good deal of killing in those days, but the drive to
Christchurch,