At the other end of the rural scale to the establishment of the great land-owner we see the home of the bush settler--the pioneer of to-day. Perhaps the Crown has leased a block of virgin forest to him; perhaps he is one of the tenants of a Maori tribe, holding on a twenty-one or forty-two years’ lease; perhaps he has contrived to pick up a freehold in the rough. At any rate he and his mate are on the ground armed with saw and axe for their long attack upon Nature; and as you note the muscles of their bared arms, and the swell of the chests expanding under their light singlets, you are quite ready to believe that Nature will come out of the contest in a damaged condition. It is their business to hack and grub, hew and burn, blacken and deface. The sooner they can set the fire running through tracts of fern or piles of felled bush the sooner will they be able to scatter broadcast the contents of certain bags of grass seed now carefully stowed away in their shanty under cover of tarpaulins. Sworn enemies are they of tall bracken and stately pines. To their eyes nothing can equal in beauty a landscape of black, fire-scorched stumps and charred logs--if only on the soil between these they may behold the green shoots of young grass thrusting ten million blades upward. What matter the ugliness and wreckage of the first stages of settlement, if, after many years, a tidy farm and smiling homestead are to be the outcome? In the meantime, while under-scrubbing and bush-felling are going on, the axemen build for themselves a slab hut with shingled roof. The furniture probably exemplifies the great art of “doing without.” The legs of their table are posts driven into the clay floor: to other posts are nailed the sacking on which their blankets are spread. A couple of sea chests hold their clothes and odds and ends. A sheepskin or two do duty for rugs. Tallow candles, or maybe kerosene, furnish light. A very few well-thumbed books, and a pack or two of more than well-thumbed cards, provide amusement. Not that there are many hours in the week for amusement. When cooking is done, washing and mending have to be taken in hand. Flannel and blue dungaree require washing after a while, and even garments of canvas and moleskin must be repaired sooner or later. A camp oven, a frying-pan, and a big teapot form the front rank of their cooking utensils, and fuel, at least, is abundant. Baking-powder helps them to make bread. Bush pork, wild birds, and fish may vary a diet in which mutton and sardines figure monotonously. After a while a few vegetables are grown behind the hut, and the settlers find time to milk a cow. Soon afterwards, perhaps, occurs the chief event of pioneer life--the coming of a wife on to the scene. With her arrival is the beginning of a civilised life indoors, though her earlier years as a housekeeper may be an era of odd shifts and desperate expedients. A bush household is lucky if it is near enough to a metalled road to