at the same time to retain Westland under my supervision as Archdeacon.
You will understand my reluctance to leave a place and people of such unique character as this; nine years of experience that few can have had; a sphere of work that promised so little, yet has yielded such results. "Going there?" said an old Missionary in London, who had heard a good deal of the wilderness of forest in Westland, and its rainfall; "Take an old hand's advice, don't be discouraged, and if it rains, let it rain." "Have you any idea," said another, "of the sort of parishioners you'll find on a goldfield?" and he insisted on presenting me with a pair of pocket pistols! Another expressed his opinion to a mutual friend that an Eton and Oxford man was not the sort for gold diggers. For some time after coming here, the problem was always haunting me how to influence such men as I had to deal with, and to lead them to higher things than the love of gold, adventure, and the joy of full-blooded strong life; men of independent habits of life and thought, who had travelled, seen the big world, rough and ready for any enterprise; amongst them all sorts and conditions, meeting you with a sense of the common equality of manhood,—so different to the inherited subserviency of men who labour with their hands in the old country. Was it right, as I often asked myself, to let the man come first, and the parson second? I may have been wrong, but I found myself instinctively in that attitude. I am tempted to tell you something in illustration of this:
Meeting a friend who had lately come by coach across the hills from Christchurch, he remarked that, on the top of the coach my name had been mentioned,
