proceeds of Lyne. Purchased for less than £4000, it fetched nearly £20,000, not reckoning intervening profits and the Melton freehold. It afforded one more illustration of the strangely-assorted luck which apparently besets colonial investments, the occasional success of outsiders, not less than the hard measure too often dealt out to pioneers.
I am not aware whether the last purchaser of Lyne found the scale of profits perennial. I doubt it, inasmuch as Duffy's Act followed, bringing darker days for the squatter. Fortune did not favour the original owners either. Cheery and full of pluck to the last, George Elms sailed for Fiji, as after an interval did his old comrade Lang—pleasant, ever-courteous "Allan-a-Dale." It was the fashionable "rush" for a while. They lie at rest under the whispering palm. Perhaps, ere the last slumber, the murmur of the surges had lulled to sleep all bitter memories of the wild southland in which their early manhood was passed.
