Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/76

58 complete the journey, he managed to cross the Southern Alps by a pass in North Canterbury at the head of the River Hurunui. He met with great hardships, and no little peril in flooded rivers, subsisting a great part of the time on birds and eels, and even the fern root which the Maoris convert into a sort of bread, needing the digestion of an ostrich; and, after many weeks, having explored the coast for nearly a hundred miles, returned to report that the country was uninhabitable, but with the barren honour of being the first white man to cross the Island from sea to sea.

At noon all assemble for service, and after dinner and much talk, all the more welcome because I am a purveyor of news from other stations and a sort of unofficial postman, I retrace my steps,—a ride of twelve miles, to a fine sheet of deep water, twelve miles in length, shut in by lofty mountains, and one of the sources of the Rakaia river. Here there is only a good sized hut in which the overseer lives, managing the estate in the owner's absence. He comes out to greet me, a tall, well-built man, in very rough clothes, which do not disguise the fact that sheepfarming was not his original vocation,—one of those enterprising, educated men who have come out to Canterbury and are doing so much for this young community by their character and example; a Cambridge man, G. S. Sale, lately Classical Lecturer at Trinity. "Come in, glad to meet you; we're just ready for supper, only myself and two men,—you won't mind roughing it, I know." The hut consisted of one fair-sized room and a couple of other rooms furnished with bunks; on the table, guiltless of a cloth, there were two large tin dishes, one of chops, the other of potatoes and cabbage, fried together, flanked by tin plates and pannikins. My