398 TUTIRA 



With that resilience which is so marked a feature in new countries, 

 the position now began to improve. On the ploughed paddocks entirely 

 open to the sun young stock throve splendidly. The miles of fencing 

 transmuted themselves into sheep. On the principle that it never rains 

 but it pours, the wet seasons passed away. They were succeeded by the 

 kind of weather that best suits Tutira : fires were everywhere obtainable 

 over a countryside tinder-dry ; an expansion of feeding area occurred 

 comparable only with the previous shrinkage. In one paddock alone 

 the number of sheep carried rose in a single season from a few score 

 to nearly two thousand. Native grasses spread enormously, suckling 

 clover seed germinated in hundreds of millions on the burnt-out pad- 

 docks. The percentage of lambs was unprecedented, the lambs them- 

 selves of excellent quality ; for the first time in the annals of the run 

 fat sheep rolled off in thousands to the freezing-works. 



Expenditure on improvements ceased, while the full effects of these 

 same improvements proclaimed themselves alike in clip, condition, 

 increase, and monetary return. The affairs of Tutira prospering pro- 

 gressively like those of another station whose possessor had also known 

 bad times, for the third time the mortgage was paid off. If the writer 

 did not, after escape from the hands of Satan, possess precisely " fourteen 

 thousand sheep and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen 

 and a thousand she asses," he owned their equivalents ; he had at least 

 as much as was good for him. The Lord, in fact, had blessed the latter 

 end of Job more than the beginning. 



There is but little more to add. In August 1914, whilst the writer 

 was at home, war broke out, the old world crashed and passed away. 

 At first he was stranded, for possession, at the age of fifty odd, of a 

 certain local knowledge of sheep-farming and of a certain field naturalist 

 acquaintance with New Zealand bird-life, are difficult to fit into the 

 plan of a European war. He was ashamed to be seen unemployed ; for 

 a couple of terms, therefore, in the scant company of British crocks and 

 blackamoors, he hid himself as a sort of superannuated undergraduate 

 at Cambridge. Later he had the good fortune, whilst soliciting employ- 

 ment as an orderly, to become acquainted with the famous and kindly 

 physician then in command of No. 3 London General Hospital. There 

 he took over and ran the grounds of that great hospital with his staff 

 of artists, known locally by the bye as " the chain gang." It is not for 

 him to say more; he believes he was of some use, and that were an 



