sat very lightly upon
us. Hope! We were all hope; we were hope incarnate! We felt that we were
bound to win. It seemed, though, that the beginning must be made in some
fashion that was, to say the least of it, unpleasant, now that we were
face to face with the reality. Plenty of work offered, but none of it
seemed to be of a particularly engaging kind; and, moreover, the wage
offered us was extremely paltry, so we considered. For we belonged to
that much maligned middle-class, which, in the chrysalis or new-chum
stage, is so greatly contemned by colonists.

But it happened that, long long ago, a certain schoolfellow of ours had
gone forth into the colonial world. He was in the sixth form when we
were in the first, or thereabouts; but, as his family and ours were
neighbours in the old home, there had been enough intimacy between us.
It was owing to his letters home that we had determined on emigration.
He had been apprised of our coming, so now we were not surprised to
receive a message from him through a resident in Auckland. This was an
invitation to join him at a distant settlement called Te Pahi, there to
make a beginning at pioneer farm work, and see what might turn up.

We found on inquiry that little or nothing was known in Auckland of Te
Pahi. It was a new township in the Kaipara district, lying sixty or
eighty miles north of Auckland. That was about the sum of what we could
learn of our destination, except that there were very few settlers in
the Kaipara, and that communication between it and Auckland was not very
good. Somewhat later than this date--in fact, to be precise, in 1875--an
Auckland newspaper wrote of the Kaipara under the title of Terra
Incognita. So that when we decided on going there, we felt that we were
about to penetrate an almost unexplored country. But we found out what
were the means of transit, and prepared to set out without further
delay.

Now that we were on the point of starting into the bush, and entering
into the realities of our new life, we began to encounter the
difficulties of our situation. The first that met us would be more
annoying were it not for the ludicrousness of it. It was the baggage
difficulty, a thing that took us quite by surprise; for, till then, we
had never appreciated the word "transport" at its full meaning. Like
most home-living Britons, hitherto surrounded by every facility for
locomotion of persons and goods, we had utterly failed to understand
that in a