160 TUTIRA 



start was made, a page was taken out, for we knew it looked rotten not 

 to have tidy well-kept books. Finally it was fixed as a debit partly, I 

 think, because a five - pound note lent us for current expenses by 

 Captain Eussell immediately before we rode up had also to be entered 

 somewhere or other. As we had just borrowed that fiver, there could 

 be no doubt that it at any rate must be a debit, and as the 9750 

 looked so absurd by itself facing the pitiable little insignificant 5, we 

 jammed the two entries into the same category. We never got further. 

 They are the only entries in that station ledger except numbers and 

 sex of wild pig slain by H. G.-S., lists of soiled linen sent to Napier, 

 and the dates of letters despatched by A. M. C. to his father in India. 



National Mortgage and Agency Co. . . . 9750 

 Captain Kussell 500 



We were great on the nothings they were safe sort of figures, and 

 filled up the page. 



With the debit and credit question thus still unsolved, the rain, 

 perhaps, began to clear we never did accounts, of course, except in 

 storms and we rushed forth to some delightful labour which kept 

 the brain entirely inactive, and produced the nirvana of muscles re- 

 laxed in rest, deep sleep and enormous appetites. Book-keeping had 

 no place in our conception of the simple life, though, perhaps, to 

 paraphrase Wolsey's lament, if we had loved our banker as we had 

 loved our legs, he would not have thus left us to perish miserably. 



Partly, then, by an unwise purchase, partly by unacquaintance and 

 inexperience of conditions that would have puzzled wise men, and partly 

 by ignorance of business and of business methods, the finances of the 

 run passed from bad to worse. The end came with the same unexpected- 

 ness that has been revealed in the pages of a former diary. There 

 occurred a crisis in the wool market the most unstable market in 

 the world. A sudden drop in prices precipitated our fall a fall which 

 could not have been in any case long postponed. A. M. C., for the 

 sum of 600, paid into the station account, was allowed to quit Tutira. 

 H. G.-S. took over the derelict half- share for the sum of five shillings. 

 He survived, a melancholy illustration of the " martyrdom of man," of 

 the theory that each individual of the human family, if he stands a 

 little higher in the scale of civilisation than his predecessor, does so 

 through the sacrifice of that predecessor that our civilisation, like a 



