"However, I dare say you are beginning to wonder what all this has to do with my tale of old times. Not being a professional story-teller, I suppose I'm not over good at shaping a yarn, especially at the beginning, but—there's some more rum in that bottle!—if you'll have patience I shall get into the thick of it directly. "Well, the district being what it is in this year of grace eighteen hundred and seventy, you may easily suppose that, sixteen years ago, it was quite like coming into an undiscovered world to come up here. At that time I believe that Karl was really the only settler in the entire tract of country; and as that comprises between two and three thousand square miles, and as there were no more Maoris then than there are now, probably not more than a total of a thousand altogether in all the little kainga round, it could scarcely be called a populous part of New Zealand. "I don't know what had tempted Karl to select up this way. Probably accident led him into the Kaipara, and when here he saw his way to something. There is no doubt that if things had gone straight he might now have been one of the richest men in the province. However, things did not go straight, and why they didn't is the subject of my tale. "I first happened upon Karl in Auckland, sixteen years ago it is now, as I have just told you. He was a German by race, but English by education, and seemed to have knocked about the world a good bit. He was a tall, powerful man, quiet and composed in general demeanour, rather pleasant to get on with, well-informed and gentlemanly, but with a decidedly rough and wild side to his character, which only appeared now and then. I agreed to hire with him for a spell, and accompanied him on his return to this district. "A year or so previously Karl had purchased Hapuakohe on the Arapaoa river—that is the place we went to help with the cattle at the other day, and the best farm in the district it is now. Karl had got about six thousand acres dirt cheap, as land goes to-day, and had settled on it at once. Being the first purchaser from the tribe, the Maoris of the district held him in high esteem, and a lot of the young men gave him their labour at the start, as part of the bargain. They helped him to get timber and build a shanty and sheds, to enclose a bit of ground for potatoes, and so on, and to put up a stockyard. Then Karl chartered a small vessel from the Manukau, and brought up his various necessaries—a few head of cattle, some pigs, fowls, a dog or two, and so forth.