[Footnote 1:  It was when he was at this work that Dr. Garnett pictures him so vividly—­“the sanguine, enthusiastic projector, fertile, inventive creator, his head an arsenal of expedients and every failure pregnant with a remedy, imperious or suasive as suits his turn; terrible in wrath or exuberant in affection; commanding, exhorting, entreating, as like an eminent personage of old he

  “With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way,
   And swims, or wades, or sinks, or creeps, or flies.”]

On the surface there were certain differences between the Canterbury colonists and those of Otago, which local feeling intensified in a manner always paltry, though sometimes amusing.  When the stiff-backed Free-Churchmen who were to colonize Otago gathered on board the emigrant ship which was to take them across the seas, they opened their psalm-books.  Their minister, like Burns’ cottar, “waled a portion wi’ judicious care,” and the Puritans, slowly chanting on, rolled out the appeal to the God of Bethel:—­

  “God of our fathers, be the God
    of their succeeding race!”

Such men and women might not be amusing fellow-passengers on a four months’ sea-voyage,—­and, indeed, there is reason to believe that they were not,—­but settlers made of such stuff were not likely to fail in the hard fight with Nature at the far end of the earth; and they did not fail.  The Canterbury Pilgrims, on the other hand, bade farewell to old England by dancing at a ball.  In their new home they did not renounce their love of dancing, though their ladies had sometimes to be driven in a bullock-dray to the door of the ballroom, and stories are told of young gentlemen, enthusiastic waltzers, riding on horseback to the happy scene clad in evening dress and with coat-tails carefully pinned up.  But the Canterbury folk did not, on the whole, make worse settlers for not taking themselves quite so seriously as some of their neighbours.  The English gentleman has a fund of cheery adaptiveness which often carries him through Colonial life abreast of graver competitors.  So the settler who built a loaf of station-bread into the earthen wall of his house, alleging that it was the hardest and most durable material he could procure, did not, we may believe, find a sense of humour encumber him in the troubles of a settler’s life.  For there were troubles.  The pastoral provinces were no Dresden-china Arcadia.  Nature is very stubborn in the wilderness, even in the happier climes, where she offers, for the most part, merely a passive resistance.  An occasional storm or flood was about her only outburst of active opposition in South-eastern New Zealand.  Nevertheless, an educated European who finds himself standing in an interminable plain or on a windy hillside where nothing has been done, where he is about to begin that work of reclaiming the desert which has been going on in Europe for thousands of years, and of which the average civilized man is