On these sheep stations life changes more slowly than elsewhere. If you wish to form an idea of what pastoral life “up-country” was forty years ago, you can still do so by spending a month or two at one of these mountain homesteads. There you may possibly have the owner and the owner’s family for society, but are rather more likely to be yourself furnishing a solitary manager with not unwelcome company. Round about the homestead you will still see the traditional features of colonial station life, the long wool-shed with high-pitched roof of shingles or corrugated iron, and the sheep-yards which, to the eye of the new chum, seem such an unmeaning labyrinth. Not far off will stand the men’s huts, a little larger than of yore, and more likely nowadays to be frame cottages than to be slab whares with the sleeping-bunks and low, wide chimneys of days gone by. In out-of-the-way spots the station store may still occasionally be found, with its atmosphere made odorous by hob-nailed boots, moleskin trousers, brown sugar, flannel shirts, tea, tar, and black tobacco. For the Truck Act does not apply to sheep stations, and there are still places far enough away from a township to make the station store a convenience to the men. [Illustration: THE WAIKATO AT NGARUAWAHIA] At such places the homestead is still probably nothing more than a modest cottage, roomy, but built of wood, and owing any attractiveness it has to its broad verandah, perhaps festooned with creepers, and to the garden and orchard which are now seldom absent. In the last generation the harder and coarser specimens of the pioneers often affected to hold gardens and garden-stuffs cheap, and to despise planting and adornment of any kind, summing them up as “fancy work.” This was not always mere stinginess or brute indifference to everything that did not directly pay, though it sometimes was. There can be no doubt that absentee owners or mortgagee companies were often mean enough in these things. But the spirit that grudged every hour of labour bestowed on anything except the raising of wool, mutton, or corn, was often the outcome of nothing worse than absorption in a ceaseless and unsparing battle with Nature and the fluctuations of markets. The first generation of settlers had to wrestle hard to keep their foothold; and, naturally, the men who usually survived through bad times were those who concentrated themselves most intensely on the struggle for success and existence. But time mellows everything. The struggle for life has still to be sustained in New Zealand. It is easier than of yore, however; and the continued prosperity of the last twelve or thirteen years has enabled settlers to bestow thought and money on the lighter and pleasanter side. Homesteads are brighter places than they were: they may not be artistic, but even the most remote are nearly always comfortable. More than comfort the working settler does not ask for.