Long wearisome rides and walks in search of truant sheep and cattle; bivouacs night after night, on the damp cold ground; mutton, damper, (a kind of coarse biscuit,) and tea (and that colonial tea) at breakfast, dinner, and supper, day after day, and week after week, and month after month; wanderings in trackless deserts, with a choice of passing the night on some bleak mountain side or wading through an unexplored swamp; and, after all this labour, finding perhaps that his flock are infected, and that no small amount of money as well as toil must be expended before he can hope for any profit at all;--these are the real experiences of a settler's early days in a young pastoral colony." Yet, upon the whole, the founders of the settlement consider that it has answered all reasonable expectations. None of the early settlers have been driven home by the failure of their prospects, and few have been so even from qualified disappointment. The plains of Canterbury have a thoroughly English look, dotted in every direction with comfortable farm-houses, well-cultivated inclosures, and rickyards filled with the produce of the harvest: and the great seaport of the colony, Lyttelton, is well filled with shipping. Christchurch boasts at length its college, incorporated and endowed. It became an episcopal see, too, in 1856, under the first bishop of Christchurch; it has its grammar school and Sunday schools. Here, too, as well as at Lyttelton, the Wesleyans have taken root, and, besides chapels, have their day and Sunday schools. From the first, the Scotch Church was represented by some enterprising settlers. The decorum of religion is everywhere perceptible; "I believe," writes a nobleman, whose name stands at the head of the Association, "that no English colony, certainly none of modern days, and I hardly except those of the seventeenth century has been better supplied with the substantial means of religious worship and education. No one doubts the great material prosperity and promise of the colony; and no one denies that it is the best and most English-like society in all our colonies.... Sometimes a very vain notion has been entertained that we meant or hoped to exclude dissenters from our settlement. Of course, nothing could be more preposterous. What we meant was to impress the colony in its origin with a strong church of England character. This was done by the simple but effectual expedient of appropriating one third of the original land fund to church purposes, but this was of course a voluntary system."