and settle, the winter climate is bleaker than that of northern or central New Zealand, and a good deal of Scottish endurance and toughness was needed before the colonists won their way through to the more fertile and open territory which lay waiting for them, both on their right hand and on their left, in the broad province of Otago.  Like General Grant in his last campaign, they had to keep on “pegging away,” and they did.  They stood stoutly by their kirk, and gave it a valuable endowment of land.  Their leaders felt keenly the difficulty of getting good school teaching for the children, a defect so well repaired later on that the primary schools of Otago are now, perhaps, the best in New Zealand, while Dunedin was the seat of the Colony’s first university college.  They had a gaol, the prisoners of which in early days were sometimes let out for a half-holiday, with the warning from the gaoler, Johnnie Barr, that if they did not come back by eight o’clock they would be locked out for the night.[1] The usual dress of the settlers was a blue shirt, moleskin or corduroy trousers, and a slouch hat.  Their leader, Captain Cargill, wore always a blue “bonnet” with a crimson knob thereon.  They named their harbour Port Chalmers, and a stream, hard by their city, the Water of Leith.  The plodding, brave, clannish, and cantankerous little community soon ceased to be altogether Scotch.  Indeed, the pioneers, called the Old Identities, seemed almost swamped by the flood of gold-seekers which poured in in the years after 1861.  Nevertheless, Otago is still the headquarters of that large and very active element in the population of the Colony which makes the features and accent of North Britain more familiar to New Zealanders than to most Englishmen.

[Footnote 1:  An amusing article might be written on the more primitive gaols of the early settlements.  At Wanganui there were no means of confining certain drunken bush-sawyers whose vagaries were a nuisance; so they were fined in timber—­so many feet for each orgie—­and building material for a prison thus obtained.  When it was put up, however, the sawyers had departed, and the empty house of detention became of use as a storehouse for the gaoler’s potatoes.

In a violent gale in the Southern Alps one of these wooden “lock-ups” was lifted in air, carried bodily away and deposited in a neighbouring thicket.  Its solitary prisoner disappeared in the whirlwind.  Believers in his innocence imagined for him a celestial ascent somewhat like that of Elijah.  What is certain is that he was never seen again in that locality.

A more comfortable gaol was that made for himself by a high and very ingenious provincial official.  Arrested for debt, he proclaimed his own house a district prison, and as visiting Justice committed himself to be detained therein.]