When he landed in New Zealand, he was a pleasant-looking, blue-eyed, energetic young officer, with a square jaw, a firm but mobile mouth, and a queer trick of half closing one eye when he looked at you.  For all his activity he suffered from a spear-wound received from an Australian blackfellow.  He was married to a young and handsome wife; and, though this was not his first Governorship, was but thirty-three.  The colonists around him were quite shrewd enough to see that this was no ordinary official, and that beneath the silken surcoat of courtesy and the plate-armour of self-confidence lay concealed a curious and interesting man.  The less narrow of them detected that something more was here than a strong administrator, and that they had among them an original man of action, with something of the aloofness and mystery that belong to

                                “a mind for ever
  Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.”

None imagined that his connection with the Islands would not terminate for half a century, and that the good and evil of his work therein would be such as must be directly felt—­to use his own pet phrase—­by unborn millions in distant days.

Chapter XIII

THE PASTORAL PROVINCES

  “Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full
  Out of their choicest and their whitest wool.”

The Company’s settlements were no longer confined to the shores of Cook’s Straits.  In 1846, Earl Grey, formerly Lord Howick, came to the Colonial Office, and set himself to compensate the Company for former official hostility.  He secured for it a loan of L250,000, and handed over to it large blocks of land in the South Island, which—­less certain reserves—­was in process of complete purchase from its handful of Maori owners.  The Company, gaining thus a new lease of life, went to work.  In 1848 and 1850 that was done which ought to have been done a decade sooner, and the void spaces of Otago and Canterbury were made the sites of settlements of a quasi-religious kind.  The Otago settlement was the outcome of the Scottish Disruption; its pioneers landed in March, 1848.  They were a band of Free Kirk Presbyterians, appropriately headed by a Captain Cargill, a Peninsular veteran and a descendant of Donald Cargill, and by the Rev. Thomas Burns, a minister of sterling worth, who was a nephew of the poet.  Otago has this year celebrated her jubilee, and the mayor of her chief city, Captain Cargill’s son, is the first citizen of a town of nearly 50,000 inhabitants which in energy and beauty is worthy of its name—­Dunedin.  For years, however, the progress of the young settlement was slow.  Purchasers of its land at the “sufficient price”—­L2 an acre—­were provokingly few, so few indeed that the regulation price had to be reduced.  It had no Maori troubles worth speaking of, but the hills that beset its site, rugged and bush-covered, were troublesome to clear