........hoped to fix it up so that I could go there as a cadet in a few days. Like most new-chums, I was bitten by the idea of taking up land; and so, when he hogged another note of me next day. I did not care to refuse a man who was about to give me the chance of getting the necessary experience. He was then handling a handsome dog-whip with a silver-mounted fawn's leg handle, and said, "That's a fine whip. Do you mind my showing it to a friend at Lower Hutt?" A few minutes later he went out, and the next I heard of him was that he had gone to try his luck in Sydney. My two notes and dog-whip vanished with him.

A month later I had got a billet as a cadet, and was living in a whare on a Wairarapa sheep-station. It was owned by two Jews and managed by a Scotchman. There were two other cadets there, and about a month after my coming the three of us were sent scrubcutting to an out-station, when it occurred to us to supplement the eternal mutton by shooting one of the owners' turkeys, which were fattening round the hut. I was away from camp at the time, and wishing to divide the responsibility of this foul deed, one man held the gun while another pulled the trigger. A rabbiter, living in the gullies some distance away, cooked the bird for us. Next night three hungery men rode across the ranges to the rabbiter's hut, and did themselves well on that turkey. The sub-boss, who, loyal to his employers interests, had stood at the at the door of the whare, like Horatius at the bridge, and dared us, with awful threats delivered in a Scotch accent like a buzz-saw cutting kauri, to bring the defunct bird across the threshold, rode into the main station with a tale of woe.

"Why don't you give them the sack?" said the manager. "Oh, I gave one of them the sack a week ago, but he took no notice, and wouldn't go!" he replied. A messenger was sent out from the head station, and the scrub-cutting camp was broken up.

Next week the manager called me into the office, where he was sitting with a man who used to act as bookkeeper, as he himself could neither read nor write, and offered me a cheque for a week's wages in lieu of notice. "What's this ?" I said. He said: "It is the amount due to you." I said I wanted a month's money, as I was engaged at so much a year, and would not go without it. He said: "Then I'll send for a trooper and have you turned off." So I replied he could send for whom he liked, but I wouldn't go without my cheque. As I was lying smoking in my bunk that afternoon, he came into the whare, and eventually agreed to pay up if I would clear out: so I saddled up and rode off over the Rimutaka Pass, and in two days reached Wellington, not sorry to end a two months' experience as a jackeroo-as they are called on the other side. I used to knock about with a gun and shoot pukakis ¹ and an occasional duck; but, apart from this, there was no relaxation except the weekly visit to the pub of the tiny township, where most of us used to ride in a body each Saturday night.

 While working on this station, I had met a Glasgow man named M^cDonald, who had come with pack-horses through the King Country, and we arranged to make the same trek that summer as soon as the tracks would be dry enough. However, He got a billet at Foxton, so I had arranged to start alone. My horse had been feeding on one of the hills at the back of Wellington, and the low country grass went through him like a bran-mash, and he got in such poor condition that I had to sell him and proceed on foot, with swag and food. Of this journey there is little to be told. I often had to do long stretches with very little tucker, perhaps partly owing to the fact that the Maoris were holding a big tangi over King Tawhaio, but also because the map supplied me by an official at the Government Buildings had many spots marked as pahs, on which I relied to get food, but, on reaching them, found they had been deserted by the inhabitants. I had been foolishly walking with my trousers turned up above the knees, and the heat of the sun, combined with the frequent fording of creeks, caused my legs to become very red and inflamed, much to the amusement of the koteros. who had never seen a pakeha with beet-coloured understandings before.

A heavy swag is a help when one is fording a swift river, as the extra weight helps to keep one's legs steady against the rush of the water. A heavy stone carried across on the shoulder will serve in the same way.

Someone told me that the previous year a white man had been stripped to his shirt and turned back by some Maoris, but I never found anything but friendliness among them, except on one occasion on the shore of Taupo Moana, when a camp of Natives took a fancy to a canvas body-belt with which I was carrying my swag, and tried to bluff me by signs into giving it to them. I could not do this, however, as I wanted it myself to carry blankets.

One night I camped in a flax whare, where an old gold-digger had been stuck up for three days by a flooded creek. He had been suffering from snow-blindness, acquired elsewhere, and we swapped yarns far into the night. I gave him some of my meat, for he seemed a 'white' man. Unfortunately. I ran short myself before I struck the next pah, and was reduced boiling a lump of gristle, which I found in my pocket, left over from the last meal. I had to make the fire of scrub manuka, which was not large enough to afford forks and a cross piece for the billy, which rested direct on the fire.

"The stars in their courses fought against Sisera." I can imagine how he felt when I recall my own feelings as the billy overturned and put out the fire.

I found a number of wild peaches near Taupo Moana, but they were more like wood than fruit and very small, also plenty of wild pigs. I could get little from the Maoris except unrisen bread, which they baked with sugar instead of salt, and I found the number of miles I could cover in a day was exactly regulated by the amount of meat I got. On one occasion I had to walk twenty-eight miles in a trifle over seven hours, with it heavy swag. if I was to reach the next pah before sundown. The pah stood off from the track, so unless I struck it by dark I should have no food. Although I had been dead beat the night before, I did the distance with comparative ease, thanks to a supper and breakfast of mutton chops, which came as a welcome change after a long stretch on nothing but ship's biscuits and kumeras.

The hot baths at Tokaanu quite cured my legs One could lie and soak in these, and enjoy the view of glittering Ruapehu. and Ngaruahoe belching smoke thirty miles to the southward, and you soon got used to the proximity of the dusky-skinned damsels who shared the blue water-holes with you.

I saw a curious rock north of Taupo shaped like a wolf's tooth. There was a local legend that the remnant of a Maori tribe had fled to the top after a battle, and the victors had put thc body of the vanquished chief into a ho1e there and he had come out hundreds of feet below into the Waikato, which washes the base of the rock.

Another yarn, which was told to me by a Maori maiden who could speak English, was that her father was once with a party hunting pigs; they got no sport, and food ran low, so they told one of the women to go and cut some flax in a lagoon near by. When she got back, her baby, which she had not taken in her Pikua, was in the pot, half-cooked; but I doubt if this yarn is genuine, as Mrs Hickson, of Auckland, an old lady whose people came out in 1823, told me that, as a rule, the Maoris would not eat of their own tribe, and in no case were the women or children allowed to eat man-meat. She told me of a fright two youngsters got who were staying at her father's house in the pre-pakeha days. There was a pah close at hand, into which the children had been forbidden to go, but one evening the two youngsters. attracted by the dancing and singing, went and looked through the stockade, and forthwith took to their heels. They were so frightened that they did not confess to having been pah till two or three days afterwards, when they said that, near to where they looked in, was a small detached party of children, who were sitting round one of the fires, talking and laughing. Stuck on a stake by the fire was the newly-severed head of one of the bodies which the adults were eating elswhere. The bairns were giving a flavour to their supper of kumeras by dabbing them against the dripping neck of the head on the stake.

It was this same Mrs Hickson whose father acted as interpreter, when George IV. rewarded a Maori chief who had protected a ship-wrecked crew of whites, by sending him a suit of armour. The presentation took place on Mr Hickson's verandah. The Maori, who was a huge man, could scarcely move his arms when trussed up in the coat of mail. He stalked up and down the verandah, a grotesque, and almost helpless object. "What is this for?" He asked, when he got it off. "To protect you from your enemies," was the reply. With his stick he raked towards him the flannel undersuit that went with the mail. "I keep this, but Ho !" he said, with quiet sarcasm, "I should feel very sorry for myself if my enemies found me when I was inside that thing."

In December I arrived in Auckland with frayed trousers, and badly in want of a haircut. For some three months I was temporarily rather hard up for ready cash, and I had to smoke sage instead of tobacco. Sage is not bad when you got used to it, and it coloured an old meerschaum I smoked right up to the rim of the bowl ; I have never seen another meerschaum so coloured.

Early in '95 I sailed from Auckland to Kristiania. The Suez route to Europe, with its principal ports of call, has been described "ad nauseam." This is Latin, and means "till it makes you sick."

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Chapter Two Norway 1895

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1 I have been told that this should in fact be pukeko, a blue-black swamp hen (Guy Etchells webmaster)

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