THE PARTNERSHIP OF H. G.-S. AND T. J. S. 229 



" DEAR SIR, I have the Pleasure of writting you these few lines hoping to 

 find you in the best of health and asking if you don't mine giving the bearer 

 10, etc., etc." 



Like master, like man our landlords were perennially impecunious ; 

 rents were spent always before they fell due, the station was expected 

 to furnish perpetual advances, to replenish their landlords' pockets with 

 sums varying from hundreds of pounds to shillings ; marriages, births, 

 and deaths were equally excellent reasons for demanding cash. All 

 these loans and advances were quite irregular; in the absence of J.P.'s 

 and licensed interpreters and stamps they need never have been 

 repaid, yet it was rarely indeed that a Maori went back on his word. 

 If a man must needs be burdened with a brood of a hundred couple 

 of landlords, let him pray Heaven on his bended knees, I say, for 

 Maori landlords. 



Often I have wondered if any work at all done on the station was 

 legally done, for if I am to credit the local natives, the original lease 

 was signed by many who had no sort of claim on the Tutira lands ; no 

 proper supervision seems to have been exercised, many of the signatures 

 were forgeries, or if that is too strong a word, one native signed for 

 another ; then again, was it clearly defined that Newton and the suc- 

 ceeding tenants of Tutira were permitted to destroy the ancient vege- 

 tation of the run, to cover it with clover and grass, to drain its swamps ? 

 Rumblings of distant thunder, that might have at any time broken over 

 our heads, reached us now and again in the shape of legal remon- 

 strances. To this day I remember one which threw Cuningham and 

 myself into the utmost consternation, we had not become calloused by 

 custom to the sword of Damocles. This particular epistle was written, 

 I recollect, by a Minister of the Crown, at the request, doubtless, of some 

 good old crusted Tory, forbidding, under the most horrible penalties, 

 the destruction of bracken. Another heathen reactionist on another 

 occasion forbade drainage, on the ground that it might affect the welfare 

 of the eels in the lake. 



To our solicitor, for comfort and sustenance, these communications 

 were taken, like Evangelist he guided us ; he dried our tears ; we 

 clung to him like shipwrecked mariners to a plank ; he stood between 

 the station and eternity. 



The rise in wool, and the new lease, were positive benefits ; negative 

 boons were the cessation of the purchase of ewe drafts and lines of 



