The yeast alone was a perpetual anxiety to me,--it would not keep beyond a certain time, and had a tendency to explode its confining bottles in the middle of the night, so it became necessary to make it in smaller quantities every ten days or so.

If by any chance I forgot to remind my scatter-brained damsels to replenish the yeast bottles, they used up the last drop, and then would come smilingly to me with the remark, "There aint not a drop o' yeast, about, anywhere, mum." This entailed flap-jacks, or scones, or soda bread, or some indigestible compound for at least three days, as it was of no use attempting to make proper bread until the yeast had worked.

Then the well needed to be deepened, a kitchen garden had to be made, shelter to be provided for the fowls and pigs; a shed to be put up for coals; a thousand things which entailed thought and trouble, had to be done.
It is true these rough jobs were not exactly in my line, but indoors I was just as busy trying to make big things fit into little spaces and _vice versa_.

We could not afford to take things coolly and do a little every day, for at that time of year an hour's change in the wind might have brought a heavy fall of snow, or a sharp frost, or a; deluge of rain down upon the uncovered and defenceless heads of our live stock.
The poor dear sheep, the source of our income, were after all the least well-cared for creatures on the Station.

A well grassed and watered run, with sunny vallies for winter feeding, and green hills for summer pasturage, had been provided by antipodean Nature for them, and to these advantages we only added some twenty or twenty-five miles of wire fencing, and then they were left to themselves, with a couple of shepherds to look after fifteen thousand sheep all the year round.
But yet, busy as we were, we found time to look up a congregation.