You could not find more favourable specimens of New Zealand colonists than the two men, Trew and Domville, who stood before us in their working dress of red flannel shirts and moleskin trousers, "Cookham" boots and digger's plush hats. Three years before this day they had landed at Port Lyttleton, with no other capital than their strong, willing arms, and their sober, sensible heads. Very different is their appearance to-day from what it was on their arrival; and the change in their position and circumstances is as great. Their bodily frames have filled out and developed under the influence of the healthy climate and abundance of mutton, until they look ten years younger and twice as strong, and each man owns a cottage and twenty acres of freehold land, at which he works in spare time, as well as having more pounds than he ever possessed pence in the old country, put safely away in the bank. There can be no doubt about the future of any working man or woman in our New Zealand colonies. It rests in their own hands, under God's blessing, and the history of the whole human race shows us that He always has blessed honest labour and rightly directed efforts to do our duty in this world. Sobriety and industry are the first essentials to success. Possessing these moral qualifications, and a pair of hands, a man may rear up his children in those beautiful distant lands in ignorance of what hunger; or thirst, or grinding poverty means. Hitherto the want of places of worship, and schools for the children, have been a sad drawback to the material advantages of colonization at the Antipodes; but these blessings are increasing every day, and the need of them creates the supply.

The great mistake made in England, next to that of sending out worthless idle paupers, who have never done a hand's turn for themselves here, and are still less likely to do it elsewhere, is for parents and guardians to ship off to New Zealand young men who have received the up-bringing and education of gentlemen, without a shilling in their pockets, under the vague idea that something will turn up for them in a new place. There is nothing which can turn up, for the machinery of civilization is reduced to the most primitive scale in these countries; and I have known 500 pounds per annum regarded as a monstrous salary to be drawn by a hard-worked official of some twenty years standing and great experience in the colony. From this we may judge of the chances of remunerative employment for a raw unfledged youth, with a smattering of classical learning. At first they simply "loaf" (as it is called there) on their acquaintances and friends. At the end of six months their clothes are beginning to look shabby; they feel they _ought_ to do something, and they make day by day the terrible discovery that there is nothing for them to do in their own rank of life. Many a poor clergyman's son, sooner than return to the home which has been so pinched to furnish forth his passage money and outfit, takes a shepherd's billet, though he generally makes a very bad shepherd for the first year or two; or drives bullocks, or perhaps wanders vaguely over the country, looking for work, and getting food and lodging indeed, for inhospitality is unknown, but no pay. Sometimes they go to the diggings, only to find that money is as necessary there as anywhere, and that they are not fitted to dig in wet holes for eight or ten hours a day. Often these poor young men go home again, and it is the best thing they can do, for at least they have gained some knowledge of life, on its dark as well as its brighter side. But still oftener, alas, they go hopelessly to the bad, degenerating into billiard markers, piano players at dancing saloons, cattle drivers, and their friends probably lose sight of them.

Once I was riding with my husband up a lovely gulley, when we heard