Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/37

Rh He has established quite a comfortable home under the flanks of Mt. Peel, with a considerable number of sheep, and several men in his employ, shepherds, sawyers, fencers, and a married couple who keep house for him. Stayed with him some days to see the working of the run, a mountain tract of 40,000 acres, scarcely trodden as yet by foot of man. One day we went on an expedition into the mountain valleys to "burn country," a process adopted here for the improvement of pasture. We led our horses up a stream, crossed it so as to secure ourselves from fire, set alight the grass, and in a short time there was such a blaze, not to mention smoke, that we had to beat a retreat. The fire spread up the hill-sides, fanned by a strong wind, and soon covered a large extent of country, burning for several days, and lighting up the neighbourhood by night.

Sunday came. I found that Tripp had already begun regular Sunday services for all hands, a very characteristic lot; a head shepherd with his wife, from Devonshire; next, a rough powerful Australian bushman, i.e. sawyer and axeman, who had been an English navvy; a splendidly-built half-caste Maori, his father a whaler, his mother a native, the best hand with shears and horses, and a great wrestler; another, an Australian black, of very low type, but gifted with strange instincts, quite incapable of book-learning, delighting like a child in highly-coloured children's pictures, but able to track man or sheep in the roughest country. "Andy, you find me if I go off whole day before you?" "Yes, sar, me find you anywhere, me follow, find you, up mountain there, on plain, find your track if you no go fast on horse." He would go great distances at a dog-trot