He was laid in the woolshed and a watch placed on guard, and early in the morning a messenger was despatched to Dr. Haast with the sad tidings. His party were at first alarmed at his non-appearance the previous evening, but at length took it for granted that he must have returned to the station, and felt confident that with his attendant and a horse he could not possibly have come to any harm, the river being easily fordable on horseback, or even on foot by a strong man, but of course such a clumsy mistake as employing too short a rope never struck anybody. The attendant who was responsible was one of the hands employed on ditching and fencing, and possibly was not much experienced at river fording, and he said the Doctor delayed so long botanising that darkness was upon them by the time they reached the fording place. Dr. Sinclair's remains were interred the following day about a mile from the homestead on the flat near the south bank of the Rangitata, where his tomb doubtless may now be seen, his last earthly resting place; and, dear old man, with all his strong antipathy to horses, what would he have thought could he have known that one was destined at last to be the cause of his death? As a set-off against the previous sad story I may relate an amusing one, in which I was myself a principal actor, and which occurred soon after my arrival at Mesopotamia. Butler was much exercised about some experimental grass-growing he was carrying on about three miles from the station, on the further side of one of the boundary streams I first referred to, where he had recently secured another slice of country. Early one morning I had started alone on foot for the paddocks, where Butler and Cook were to meet me later, riding, and if I found the stream too high to ford on foot, I was to await their arrival. On reaching the river it was so swollen as to be unsafe to attempt fording, and so, lighting my pipe, I sat down under the shelter of a large boulder, and presently fell asleep. When I woke up, after some considerable time, and remembered where I was, I feared that Cook and Butler must have passed while I slept, and was on the point of returning to the station, when I observed two horsemen a long way down stream, apparently searching for something. I speedily understood what was on foot. My friends were laboriously seeking for my dead body, having naturally supposed, when they could not find me at the paddock, that I had tried to ford the river and been washed away. The idea of these two men spending the morning hunting for a supposed drowned man, who was enjoying a sound sleep near them all the time, was so ludicrous that I could not refrain from an immoderate fit of laughter when they arrived.