Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/394

356 after a most generous estimate of my work,—"Behold how good and joyful a thing it is, brethren, to dwell together in Charity." As part of the presentation made during the evening, I received a beautifully bound "Citizen's Appreciation," containing an illuminated address, with photographs and water-colour views of Timaru and South Canterbury.

I am adding a few words on board the steamer in which I left the Bluff, the southernmost part of New Zealand. I was there in 1857, as I mentioned in my first letters when no craft had visited it, save an occasional whaler, and a few Maori canoes; now a busy harbour.

It is New Year's day. I am watching the fast receding coast-line of forest-covered hills and their background of snowy peaks, leaving behind me fifty-four years of experience and work. Work shared with many others who made the great venture of migration to a new land in the uttermost parts of the earth. Work, too, of far wider importance than we realized at the time, of beginning and shaping the early years of a new national life. I can imagine no happier privilege, in such a well favoured country, and with fellow workers and pioneers of the sort which New Zealand may well be proud of.

My share in this, now belongs to the past, but by no means a past gone for ever, the end of a chapter never to be reopened. Do you remember Dryden's lines?