Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/68



July 20th, 1861.

Since my last letter a long time has elapsed, spent in my first beginnings of work after ordination, but I may be able to give you a better idea of it than if I had written sooner.

Please put away all ideas of a Parish at Home, town or country. My "Pastoral district" has an area of about nine hundred square miles, all of it as Nature made it, roadless, but now occupied by a few sheepfarmers, shepherds and labourers, in all some four hundred persons, living at great distances from each other. One half of the country is plain, the rest hill and mountain; it stretches from the immediate neighbourhood of Christchurch to the Southern Alps, which at present form an impassable barrier westwards. One of my brothers has a sheep station in the hills, almost in the centre of the district, and with him I make my home; it is the first organized country district in the Canterbury Settlement, outside Christchurch and its neighbourhood, under charge of a resident clergyman; and so I may in some sense regard myself as a missionary, albeit my parishioners are mostly Church people.

For my work I keep three horses, and am in the saddle from Friday till Tuesday every week, visiting every part of my district, and generally seeing every