grants are temporarily housed, we find an animated scene
before us. Here are assembled most of our immigrant shipmates, some few
of whom have already got engagements and gone off. A considerable party
of settlers and agents are now busily at work trying to hire the people
they severally want; while the poor bewildered immigrants find
themselves treated as though they were goods in an auction-room, and
scarcely know whether they are standing on their heads or their heels.

It so happens that there is just now a great demand for agricultural and
domestics, so that settlers are actually bidding against each other for
the individuals they want to engage. Our ship-load was no special body
of people, but a motley collection of men, women, and children from all
parts of the old country. Among them are natives of Kent and of
Cornwall, of Yorkshire and of Wales, of Inverness and of Galway.

Here are a couple of brothers whom we made special friends with on the
voyage, young hardy Scots; let us see how they get on. We find them at a
premium, surrounded by a little crowd of farmers from the Waikato, who
each and all seem intent on hiring them. The lads do not wish to part if
they can help it; and so, as to get one means to get both, the farmers
are all the hotter in their pursuit of them. For these young men are
just the right sort that are most wanted, having the thews and sinews
and power of endurance so necessary for a rough life; having experience
of sheep and cattle and agricultural work from their earliest infancy;
having, in fact, all the qualities most essential and useful to the
pioneer farmer. They come of the right race, too, as all the world
knows--colonists especially--for honesty, sobriety, and patient
industry.

What a change for them--from the inclement sky, the hostile winter, the
rugged battle for life they have left behind them with their native
Grampians, to this bright clime of everlasting summer, of strange
fertility, to these sunshiny isles of beauty and plenty! Well, well, it
is not a land of indolence either; the work demanded here is stern and
hard and rough; but what a reward may be reaped in the end from earnest
and unshrinking toil! No wonder if, in a year or two's time, our friends
yonder will write to the dear ones they left at home, in the Perthshire
glen, such an account as shall bear witness that they, at least, have
found on earth the Peasant's Paradise!

There is hot and excited bargaining go