CHAPTER XVI: Doctoring without a diploma.
So many reminiscences come crowding into my mind,--some grave and others gay,--as I sit down to write these final chapters, that I hardly know where to begin.
The most clamorous of the fast-thronging memories, the one which pushes its way most vividly to the front, is of a little amateur doctoring of mine; and as my patient luckily did not die of my remedies, I need not fear that I shall be asked for my diploma.
Shearing was just over; over only that very evening in fact.

We had been leading a sort of uncomfortable picnic life at the home station for more than ten days, and had returned to our own pretty little home up the valley, late on Saturday night, in time for the supper-dinner I have so often described.

It was my doing, that fortnight's picnic at the home station, and I may as well candidly confess it was a mistake; although, made, like most mistakes in life, with good intentions.

Our partner had gone to England, our manager had just left us to set up sheep-farming on his own account, and all the responsibility of shearing a good many thousand sheep devolved on F----.

And not only the shearing; the flock had to be carefully draughted, the ewes, wethers, and hoggets, to be branded, ear-marked, and turned out on their several ranges; the wethers for home consumption, which consisted of a good-sized flock of many hundred sheep, turned into the home-paddock,--an enclosure of some five or six hundred acres,--and various other minute details to be seen to; the wool to be sent down to Christchurch, and the stores brought up by the return drays.
My motives for the plan I formed for us to go over, bag and baggage, to the home station, the evening before the shearing began, and live there till it was over, were varied.