Perhaps it will be better understood now why we live in a shanty, and why the furniture of it is so unique in quality and restricted in quantity. How we have got on so well is a marvel, and shows what hard work will do in this country. A thousand pounds would have bought our station outright. But we had not a thousand pounds among us, or anything like it; and we had to reserve money to live on for the first year, to buy our axes and spades and milk-pans, and to buy the nucleus of our future herds and flocks and droves. We have done all we had to do, and now we are beginning to see that our joint work during all these years will eventually produce for us homes and comfort.
It is a hard and difficult thing to make money without capital to start with. It is as hard a thing to do in the colonies as it is at home, though people at home are apt to think differently. And it is always the early years of toil that are the worst.
Money is like an apple-tree. At first it grows but slowly, and there is no fruit. Then there come little scanty crops, increasing year by year, until at length the tree attains maturity. Then there are full crops, and you realize a handsome profit on your planting.
Our station--or, as you may choose to term it, our estate, selection, place, farm, location, homestead, or run--may be reckoned a choice bit of land.
The soil is not all of one character, it seldom is so on any one farm in this country, but it is all good class. Most of it is a rich black humus, resting on clay and mountain limestone. In configuration it is of the roughest, like the country generally, being an abrupt succession of ranges, gullies, and basins, in every variety of form and size.
When we took possession, nearly every inch of the property was covered with what is termed light bush. It might have been a slice out of the New Forest. The light bush is just as dense a wood of small trees, twenty to fifty feet in height, shrubs, creepers and undergrowth, as can well be conceived of. Where the thicket is thinner the trees are larger, and the smaller they are the denser the covert. If you wish to journey through this light bush, where there is no semblance of a track, it will take you perhaps two hours to make a single mile, so thick is it. To ride through it is, of course, impossible, unless a track has been cut.
