was a very rare experience, indeed, to get ashore with a dry skin. The boats—big and heavy as they were—were not unfrequently tossed aloft like chips, and sent rolling up on the shingle, bottom upward like so much driftwood. Lives were not unfrequently lost and goods often sacrificed.
The village boasted then of only a few shops, one or two warehouses along the beach, and less than half a dozen inferior hotels. The Timaru Herald of that date was published in a very small weatherboard hut, quite detached, and perched on a waste hillock overlooking the ocean. The very hill itself has now disappeared, to make room for the railway, and the Herald is much more suitably housed. At that time the streets were fearfully and wonderfully made. Bullock teams might be stuck up in the main streets until the townspeople came to the assistance of the teamster to dig them out. All the houses were of wood, and were set down very much at random. When the annual races were held, the young bloods and station hands "from all the region round about," "The boys" from the Mackenzie country, the sawyers from the Waimate, the half-breeds and "cockatoos" from Temuka and the Arowhenua Bush, and all the "flotsam and jetsam" from every accommodation-house within a radius of fifty miles used to come into town, and for a lively week or two high saturnalia used to be held.
At that time Timaru had the reputation of being the fastest, most racketty, riotous township in the South Island. Verily, I could a tale disclose
