The timber in due time was felled, cut up, and carted to the station, and we removed our camp to the site of the operations.  It was a bleak, wild place, three miles from the south mail track, and consisted only of a small slab hut or two with a wool shed and sheep yards.  The owner, Mr. T. Moorhouse, had lately purchased the run, and was about to improve and reside on it.  A description of our life here would not be interesting, so I will pass over three months during which we worked steadily and the buildings were nearly complete, when one day, as I was nailing the shingles on a roof under a powerful sun, I suddenly felt sick and giddy, and was obliged to go inside and lie down.  The same evening I developed a severe attack of gastric fever which three days after turned to a kind of brain fever, and for nigh on six weeks I lay betwixt life and death.  For half of this time I lay on the floor in a corner of the new building, the bare ground with a layer of tea leaves for my bed, the noise grinding into my brain when I was at all conscious, and only Metcalfe (good man that he was) with an old Scottish shepherd to look after me when they could find time to do so.  No doctor, medicine, or attendance of any kind was procurable nearer than sixty miles away, with a weekly post.  One night, to make me sleep they gave me laudanum (a bottle of which Metcalfe had with him for toothache) and the following morning I was discovered standing on the brink of an artificial pond nearly a quarter of a mile off, barefoot and half naked, to reach which I must have walked over places I could not easily have passed in my senses.  This was when the brain attack came on, and for a week I lay, I was told, almost unconscious.  Metcalfe contrived to send some information to Christchurch, and after I had been down for over three weeks Moorhouse arrived and removed me to his own hut, where he looked after me for some time.  Then he had me carried to and fixed up in his dog cart and drove me sixty miles over the plains in a single day to Christchurch, where I arrived a good bit more dead than alive, but to find a comfortable room, and every attendance and luxury a sick man could wish for, prepared for me by my good friends Mr. and Mrs. Gresson.  I must have taken a good deal of killing in those days, but the drive to Christchurch, severe as it was, saved me, and in three weeks I was myself again.

When I was convalescent I found letters from home awaiting me.  My father sent a little money, but wished me to utilise it in paying my passage home, and appeared to have lost faith in my doing any good in New Zealand; but I was more determined than ever to remain.  Was I not accumulating colonial experiences, and always found employment of some kind awaiting me? and I was still very young—­only a little over eighteen.  The free life I had spent for nearly two years had had its effect, and I could not consent to throw it up, at any rate not just yet.

The doctors who had attended me expressed their opinions that I had overtaxed my strength at work to which I was not accustomed, and forbade my undertaking anything of the kind for a while.  This of course was nonsense, but I saw no reason why I should not enjoy a holiday for a month or so in Christchurch till I had settled future plans.