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CHAPTER XXIII. 



THE PARTNERSHIP OF H. G.-S. AND T. J. S. 



REVERTING to the natural history of homo sapiens and the efforts of the 

 earliest specimens of the breed to acclimatise themselves on Tutira, it 

 will be recollected that at the end of Chapter XVIII. we had left the 

 station in direst need ; its life-blood had dried up in consequence of a 

 fall in the price of wool. There existed no longer the wherewithal to 

 pay interest on the station overdraft, let alone rent and working 

 expenses. One of the partners had released himself from liability to 

 the National Mortgage and Agency Company by forfeit of 600 into 

 the credit of the station. The other had taken over the derelict half- 

 share for 5s. ; the martyrdom of man, in fact, had been consummated ; 

 Newton, Toogood, Charles Stuart, Thomas Stuart, William Stuart, 

 Kiernan, Mackenzie, Cuningham, pass before me in sad procession, like 

 the ghostly kings in " Richard the Third." They had perished in time 

 or cash. 



The miserable outcome of eight years' labour on Tutira was the 

 writer of this volume. He stood, so to speak, on tiptoe, insecurely 

 balanced on the piled carcases of his predecessors, up to his lips in debt. 

 Because he was young and foolish, and because he had not then lived as 

 he has since done to see wool at bed-rock three times in thirty years 

 and three times recover he was filled with the gloomiest forebodings for 

 the future, not only of himself and of Tutira, but of New Zealand ; in his 

 mature opinion the Dominion was doomed. His relatives, however, were 

 wiser ; after again demonstrating the lesser evil of drunkenness compared 

 with the fatuous perusal of Henry George and the perpetration of verse, 

 they proved, and this he readily credited, that things could not possibly 

 be worse. The National Mortgage and Agency Company, moreover, did 

 not feel inclined to release another owner at any price. The writer, in 



