"Books d——d rot—lies, end to end; must go yourself to find out. My third trip."
"Then you like it?" pursued the emigrant, stimulated by this wholesale depreciation of a country which all other accounts represented as the Promised Land.
"Have to like it," answered the other; "billet in this infernal New Zealand Company. Wish I'd broke my leg the day I applied. Heard of it, I suppose?"
Mr. Massinger had indeed heard of it. Had read blue-books, correspondence, letters, articles, and reviews, in which the New Zealand Land Company was alternately represented as a providential agency for saving the finest country in the world for British occupation, for finding homes on smiling farms for the crowded population of Great Britain, for Christianizing the natives as well as instructing them in the arts of peace; or, as a syndicate of greedy monopolists, insidiously working for the accumulation of vast estates, and oppressing a noble and interesting race, whose lands they proposed to confiscate under a miserable pretence of sale and barter.
"I have heard and read a good deal of the proceedings of the New Zealand Land Company; but accounts differ, so that they are perplexing to a stranger."
"Naturally; all interested people—one myself," said his new acquaintance. "But, as we've got so far, permit me?" and extracting a card from a neat porte-monnaie, he handed it to Massinger, who, glancing at it, perceived the name of
Mr. Dudley Slyde,
Secretary to the New Zealand Land Company,
Auckland and Christchurch.
"Happy to make your acquaintance," he said. "I am not sure that I have a card. My name is Massinger."
"What! Massinger of the Court, Herefordshire? Heard generally you had sold your place and gone in for colonizing. What the devil—er—excuse me. Reasons, no doubt; but if I had the luck to be the owner of Massinger Court—born to it, mind you—I'd have seen all the colonies swallowed up by an earthquake before I'd have left England. No! not for all New Zealand, from the 'Three Kings' to Cape Palliser."
"If all Englishmen felt alike in that respect, we shouldn't have had an empire, should we?" suggested the other. "Somebody must take the chances of war and adventure."