supply the West Coast Diggings which had just "broken out" (as the
curious phrase goes there), and so was every description of grain
and dairy produce.

We squatters were not the only inhabitants of this fool's paradise.
The local Government began planning extensive works: railways were
laid out in every direction, bridges planned across rivers, which
proved the despair of engineers; whilst a tunnel, the wonder of the
Southern Hemisphere, was commenced through a range of hills lying
between Port Lyttleton and Christchurch. All this work was
undertaken on a scale of pay which made the poor immigrants who
thronged to the place by every ship, rub their eyes and believe they
must be dreaming, and that they would presently wake up and find
themselves back again in the old country, at the old starvation rate
of wages. Small capitalists, with perhaps only one or two hundred
pounds in the world, bid against each other as purchasers of
quarter-acre sections in the fast-springing townships, or of
fifty-acre lots of arable land in the projected suburbs.
Subscriptions were raised for building a Cathedral in Christchurch;
but so dear was both labour and material, that 7,000 pounds barely
sufficed to lay its foundations.

The paramount anxiety in men's minds seemed to be to secure land.
Sheep-runs in sheltered accessible parts of the country commanded
enormous prices, and were bought in the most complicated way. The
first comers had taken up vast tracts of land in all directions from
the Government, at an almost nominal rental. This had happened
quite in the dark and remote ages of the history of the colony, at
least ten or twelve years before the date of which I write. As
speculators with plenty of hard cash came down from Australia, these