Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/178

 from, I think, Donside, and many a day he and I had pushed and pulled the heavy cross-cut saw, or wielded axe and maul together in the Otaio bush in the olden days.

Jim's astonishment when I greeted him by name was very amusing. He did not recognize me; but remembered me when I asked after the young cadet he had known so long ago. My interview with poor Jim was worth all the pilgrimage, and before I left Timaru he brought most of the surviving friends of my early days to see me.

Ah me! these meetings in after life; are they not full of pathos? What a record of deaths and failures, as we call up the muster roll which memory suggests.

How essentially colonial, too, these chance meetings. How quickly the comradeship is formed. How soon, may be, to be sundered, and yet "once a mate always a mate" in the colonies. We had not seen each other for over twenty years, and yet the old bush, the wool-shed, the whare, with its idle group of Crimean-shirted, black-bearded stockmen, shepherds, bullock-puncher, horse-breakers, fencers, and general rouseabouts, as they used to muster on the quiet Sunday, all came back to us; and as naturally, as if no time had since elapsed, big with changes to both of us, we reverted to the old days; and long-forgotten names and incidents came to our lips, as eager query and rejoinder passed between us.

"Old Donald; you remember him?"