Page:Reminiscences of Earliest Canterbury 1915.pdf/202



Hitherto these reminiscences have, in the main, dealt with other people, or with natural conditions, along the lines of observation and inference; and, as reminiscences, throwing a fitful light here and there on the early colonial life of New Zealand. I can, without vanity, say that they may be of some value when a systematic history of this colony comes to be written.

Departing from those lines, and with a view, perhaps, to afford amusement to my younger readers, I wish now to recall a few scattered recollections of my childhood. The incidents I am about to record are very simple, and I have been prompted to relate them on this very account; for, if they serve no other purpose, they will show how different was my environment from that of the children of to-day. I was brought up in the lap of Nature, far removed from the achievements of art and science; even the civilisation that touched my early life was rudimentary; so rudimentary, that the frontier between my life in the early ’forties and that of the boys of to-day is an infinitely wider, and more inaccessible one, than that which existed between me and the little