ooth pebbles which the bird had carried in his craw for digestive
purposes, and I recollect one day employing a number of the bones in
making a footway over a small creek.

A complete skeleton of the Moa bird is to be seen in the British
Museum.

I had now obtained a fresh contract for making cuttings, draining
swamps, and bridging over some ten miles in the Lower Ashburton gorge
and Valley, and I was busily engaged all the summer and autumn. There
were some extensive patches of swampy ground where great difficulty was
experienced in passing the heavy wool drays, and to make a feasible road
over them was one of my tasks, and an interesting one it proved, giving
some scope to my engineering ability. Having laid out the proposed line
of road over the marsh, I cut from it at right angles, and some 300 feet
in length, a channel wide and deep enough, I calculated, to convey away
the flood water during heavy rains, and from the upper end of this
channel I cut four feeding drains, two running along the road line, and
two diagonally, all four meeting at the top end of the main channel;
over the latter, at this point, I constructed a wooden bridge of rough
green timber from the forest, distant about eight miles. I sunk a row of
heavy round piles or posts about a foot in diameter at each side of the
channel, which was fifteen feet wide, securing them with heavy
transverse beams spiked on to their tops; over this I laid heavy round
timber stretchers, about nine inches in diameter and four in number,
upon which were spiked closed together a flooring of stout pine saplings
from two and a half to four inches thick. The floor between these was
then covered with a thick layer of brushwood, topped with earth and
gravel. The road embankment was then carried on from each side till the
swamp was cleared. I am particular about describing this, as it was my
first attempt at bridge building and draining, and of all the thousands
of bridges I have since constructed, I do not think any one of them
interested me more keenly than these in the Ashburton Valley when I was
a lad of nineteen. The bridges and roads over the marshes proved quite
satisfactory, and it was a real delight to me when the first teams of
wool drays passed over safely. I was at the same time engaged on the
cuttings, and got some of them completed before the severe winter set
in.

I was so busy this season that much of my time was necessarily spent in
supervising between the