CONTENTS
Preface. Letter I. Two months at sea—Melbourne
Letter II. Sight-seeing in Melbourne
Letter III. On to New Zealand
Letter IV. First introduction to "Station life"
Letter V. A pastoral letter
Letter VI. Society—houses and servants
Letter VII. A young colonist—the town and its neighbourhood
Letter VIII. Pleasant days at Ilam
Letter IX. Death in our new home—New Zealand children
Letter X. Our station home
Letter XI. Housekeeping, and other matters
Letter XII. My first expedition
Letter XIII. Bachelor hospitality—a gale on shore
Letter XIV. A Christmas picnic, and other doings
Letter XV. Everyday station life
Letter XVI. A sailing excursion on Lake Coleridge
Letter XVII. My first and last experience of "camping out"
Letter XVIII. A journey "down south"
Letter XIX. A Christening gathering—the fate of Dick
Letter XX. the New Zealand snowstorm of 1867
Letter XXI. Wild cattle hunting in the Kowai Bush
Letter XXII. The exceeding joy of "burning"
Letter XXIII. Concerning a great flood
Letter XXIV. My only fall from horseback
Letter XXV. How We lost our horses and had to walk home
These letters, their writer is aware, justly incur the reproach of egotism and triviality; at the same time she did not see how this was to be avoided, without lessening their value as the exact account of a lady's experience of the brighter and less practical side of colonization. They are published as no guide or handbook for "the intending emigrant;" that person has already a literature to himself, and will scarcely find here so much as a single statistic. They simply record the expeditions, adventures, and emergencies diversifying the daily life of the wife o