152 TUTIRA 



poor. There was no compensation for improvements. It seems im- 

 possible now that any reasonable soul could have believed there was 

 either money or reputation to be made out of them. 



The truth is, that their owners were not reasonable, that they did 

 not think at all. Most of them were new chums hardly out of their 

 teens, of the sort moreover who welcomed physical toil as a delight, who 

 preferred manual labour to any kind of thinking. To this day indeed 

 I am not sure whether we were splendid young Britons, empire builders, 

 and so forth, in a small way, or asses of the purest water. We bored 

 inland for freedom, for adventure, for the chance of dealing with stock 

 and soil, in obedience perhaps to an instinctive desire to push further 

 back. Only for very brief intervals, and only in very careless fashion, 

 did we think about the pound, shilling, pence aspect of our work. There 

 were no proper books kept. Jottings in the station diary represented 

 the Italian or double -entry system of book-keeping, as taught by 

 Dominie Sampson to Lucy Bertram. Figures were doubly distasteful 

 after a hard day's work work, of course, was physical work. The idea 

 of wasting even a wet day on accounts never seemed to have entered 

 our heads. The sole excuse for such distasteful idleness we called it 

 idleness would have been ill-health. Nobody ever was ill in those 

 glorious days, so the accounts were left undone. The result was that 

 the finances of the station were never properly known. It was a dis- 

 ability not decreased by the New Zealand habit of purchasing 30s. 

 worth of property with 20s. worth of cash. 



We enjoyed a perfectly happy open-air life in the present, convinced 

 that everything, of course, would turn out all right. We split posts, 

 we erected fences, we mustered sheep, we killed pig and cattle less 

 from any particular reason in connection with money-making or even 

 benefit to the station than from an insatiable appetite for exercise ; we 

 lived, I may say, to gratify the calves of our legs. We enjoyed to the 

 full a giant appetite, a slumber unperturbed, that anodyne, too, which 

 keeps the labourer content the delightful physical feeling of relaxation 

 after prolonged muscular toil described by Tolstoi in certain passages 

 of ' Anna Karenina.' 



It was the delicious reward of a real good day's work "real good " 

 meant daylight to dark; "work" meant manual labour riding or 

 packing or mustering, or pig-hunting or fencing or bush-felling. We 

 cooked for ourselves ; we lived on porridge and water, bread baked in 



