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Chapter I
Introductory

On May 7th, 1875, I stood beside my father, mother, and sister, a solemn little boy between eight and nine, upon the deck of the steamship Falster as she sped southwards across the waters of the Sound and we took our last look at the spires and towers of Copenhagen, beloved city of our birth, now fast fading from sight upon the horizon. We made Lübeck next morning; entrained there for Hamburg, and embarked upon the good ship Friedeburg, then lying in Elbemouth, off Cuxhaven, to sail on the morrow for the port of Napier, Hawke's Bay, New Zealand.

Had I but known it, I was setting out upon a great adventure. I was about to change my hemisphere, my nationality, and my mother-tongue. Not one of us knew a single word of the language of the country we were going to. Nor did we know much else about it, except vague stories we had heard of Maori wars, but recently concluded, of "Hauhaus" and cannibals, and of nuggets of rich red gold to be gathered by the wayside. It was the Land of Hope, where my father proposed to himself to repair his broken fortunes and begin life anew. He was over forty years of age; he had a wife and two children dependent upon him; and all his page 4worldly possessions he carried in his pocket in a leather wallet; it was what he had saved from the wreck after paying his debts, and amounted to the sum of fourteen pounds sterling. But he was a visionary, a dreamer of dreams, and nothing daunted him.

Fifty years later, on February 24th, 1925, in that same town of Napier where we had landed and where I had lived during my earlier years in the Colony, I took my seat for the first time upon the Bench of the Supreme Court, on circuit, as one of His Majesty's Judges. A few months later, in the city we had left half a century before, the papers published the news of my appointment with summaries of my career, expressing a kindly interest— not unnatural in a very small country—in the fact that for the first time in history a Dane had been chosen to be "Höjesteretsdommer "—a Judge of the Supreme Court in the great British Empire.

The fifty years that lie between have all been lived in this little Colony. I have therefore not been brought into contact with great events or great characters in history. I have accomplished nothing, either in public affairs or in private life, that would justify me in "making a song about it," still less a book. And yet, even in these circumscribed surroundings, my life has been various and adventurous, diversified with something of the humour and romance of early colonisation, always strenuous, sometimes bizarre, but never at any time, I think, dull. I have earned my own livelihood since I was twelve and a half years old, and would not for anything have missed the fun and joy of doing it. Pupil teacher and tradesman's clerk, college student page 5and university lecturer, schoolmaster and journalist, amateur actor and platform speaker—I have tried them all and enjoyed them all with a zest that has never flagged. And when at the age of thirty-eight I was admitted to the Bar and entered upon my twenty years' career as advocate, I found in this new art all that it holds in store for those who faithfully and zealously pursue it—rich treasures of human experience, streaked and veined with the gold of humour.

I propose in this book to set down in plain and simple language a plain and simple narrative of those fifty years. I fully realise that of reminiscences and anecdotes of journalists and barristers, and even of schoolmasters, the reading public has of late years had an oversupply. I venture to hope that their colonial setting may give to mine some sense of freshness; and I can at least promise that in the course of writing the book I shall not forget the exhortation of Horace, "Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem."

But it is not without much inward trepidation that I approach the task I have set myself. The first part of my book, for example—that in which I propose to recount my efforts to scrape up a more or less adequate education and to qualify myself for some profession or other—suppose my readers should mistake me for Dr. Smiles and my book for a colonial version of "Self-Help"! It is true I have never read a single line of the edifying works of that didactic pietist, but suppose—! Well, all I can say is that I defy the most diligent search to discover even the semblance of a "moral" in any one of my chapters.

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And as to the second part, that is intended to be a narrative of twenty years of work at the Bar. In it I propose to write something about cases in which I was counsel; but I seem to have forgotten all those I lost and to remember only those I won. Then, too, I want to illustrate the art of advocacy by citing here and there an instance of effective cross-examination or a point that went home with a jury, of a speech that won a case or a quip that pleased a Judge. But there again all the really good things I have no doubt my colleagues at the Bar brought off persistently elude my memory, while the odd "lucky hits" that were my own obtrude themselves with unblushing pertinacity on my recollection. How, then, can I hope to escape the sin that besets so many writers of memoirs?

I consulted some of my friends about this difficulty, and their advice was given with characteristic frankness.

"Well, you know," said the first, "modesty is really a very poor virtue; and your worst enemy has never suspected you of intemperate indulgence in it, so why worry?"

This didn't sound quite satisfactory somehow, so I tried another.

"My dear fellow," said he, "you have set yourself to write the story of your life; that absolutely dwarfs all lesser egotisms. The reader who can forgive you the major offence won't even notice the minor ones."

This, if anything, was worse, I thought. So I went along to a third, and as to his answer—well, I must leave the reader to judge whether I can any longer call him "friend."

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"Make your mind easy," said this amiable paragon of candour. "If your anecdotes and your `good things' were only one-half as clever or one-fourth as funny as you think they are, you might be suspected of vanity in retailing them; but really, you know, they simply aren't."

And so, as I clearly cannot trust to the indulgence of my friends, I must needs trust to that of my readers—"gentle readers" they used to be called in the dear old Victorian days. May they still deserve that epithet, and may none of them so ungentle his condition as to count the number of capital "I's" in this book!