Small capitalists, with perhaps only one or two hundred pounds in the world, bid against each other as purchasers of quarter-acre sections in the fast-springing townships, or of fifty-acre lots of arable land in the projected suburbs.

Subscriptions were raised for building a Cathedral in Christchurch; but so dear was both labour and material, that 7,000 pounds barely sufficed to lay its foundations.
The paramount anxiety in men's minds seemed to be to secure land.
Sheep-runs in sheltered accessible parts of the country commanded enormous prices, and were bought in the most complicated way.

The first comers had taken up vast tracts of land in all directions from the Government, at an almost nominal rental.

This had happened quite in the dark and remote ages of the history of the colony, at least ten or twelve years before the date of which I write.

As speculators with plenty of hard cash came down from Australia, these original tenants sold, as it were, the good-will and stock of their run at enormous prices; but what always seemed to me so hard was, that after you had paid any number of thousand pounds for your run, you might have to buy it all, or at any rate, some portion of it, over again.