275 



CHAPTEK XXVIII. 



BURDENS OF SIN. 



ANOTHER group of new-comers can quite well be pictured as having 

 been dumped on Tutira carried up, that is, and cast down as sud- 

 denly as Christian in Bunyan's allegory rids himself of his load. 

 Many burdens of sin have thus on the station been dropped by many 

 pilgrims, some of them living animals, some of them larger members of 

 the vegetable kingdom itself, and some of them not living at all, in- 

 sensate, inanimate, though endowed with motion. The larger have 

 carried the lesser on their backs, in the manner that peasants in 

 Egypt to this day account for the simultaneous yearly appearance 

 of the stork and quail. 



Aliens of this group caught in the very act, whose origins are 

 known as positively as there can be certitude and finality in such 

 matters at all, are given priority of place. Others there are about 

 whose method of arrival the writer himself entertains no doubt, but 

 regarding whose appearance innumerable details of likelihood, if given 

 to prove the point, would too greatly cumber our story ; others again 

 there are which may have reached the run in one of many several 

 ways. Sweet vernal-grass (AntJiroxanthum odoratum), growing in '82 

 in close proximity to the cherry-grove near Craig's whare, was in all 

 likelihood carried up in roots or earth adhering to them. Suckers had 

 been taken by Craig from a long-established clump at Havelock North, 

 a township within a short distance of light river-bed country scores of 

 acres of which used to be densely covered with sweet vernal. For 

 twenty years after my arrival, at any rate, sweet vernal was elsewhere 

 unknown on the station. 



Procumbent speedwell (Veronica dgrestis) was carried up in soil 

 attached to the roots of certain moss-roses planted immediately after 

 completion of the original cottage in '83. To this day I think with 



