The Old Farmstead.

The first home I knew, the first trees and flowers, were on the soil that had only ten years before been a battlefield. That is my favourite sleep-time roving ground. The farm lay with a gentle tilt to the north and the quarter of greatest sunshine. There were Maori-planted peach-groves and cherry groves, and big almond trees with flat stones at their feet where Maori children before us had cracked the stone fruit.

There were tongues of raupo and flax swamp thrust into the land from the broad belt of forest that covered the main swamp on the north—rich pasture land now, with scarcely a white pine or a rimu left. A small swampy stream flowed through the deep valley on the west of the knoll on which our home stood. It was a wonderful play-water for small boys. Harry, the North of Ireland man who worked on the farm, made a toy water-wheel for me; it clacked merrily at a tiny water-fall. Lower down there had been a small Maori flour-mill, in the wheat-growing days before the War. The old mill-dam, fed by the little creek and large springs, was now used for watering the farmer's cattle and sheep.

Where the stream crooked its way past a large grove of acacia trees, and a peach grove, there was wild mint growing and there were wild straw-berries under the peach trees, and the ruins of Maori houses, relics of the peaceful missionary days when there were several villages of Ngati-Raukawa here. The settler's wife sometimes walked down here with the children in the lovely weather when the winds were awhile at rest. She gathered the mint that grew in the clear water where the stream, only a few feet wide, rippled over a mossy log. We shook down ripe peaches—the size, the colour, the fragrance, the honeyed taste of those peaches!—and hunted for the small, tartly sweet wild strawberries.

The songs and hymns my mother loved to sing in those happy dream-days seemed to mingle with the small voice of the streamlet as it tumbled over the old fallen tree. She sang “Buy a Besom,” and “Rosalie the Prairie Flower”; she sang:—

By cool Slloam's shady rill
How fair the lily grows;
How 3weet the breath beneath the bill
Of Sharon's dewy rose.

Those fields have long gone to strangers, who do not know the place traditions and associations that became a part of my being. Most of the old groves have been felled; the waterways have dwindled. But the magic murmur of that little creek under the flax bushes and the peach trees and acacias page 30 blends still in dear memory with the sweetest songs ever sung.