Two or three men were engaged in pointing the stakes, and dumping and malleting them into the ground. Sometimes they would put up four or five chains in the day, sometimes only one; it depended on the nature of the ground. When the weather was wet, and the ground soft, the work was naturally lighter. After the stakes were set up we had to batten them together. We bought several boatloads of battens--rough outside boards split up, and the like--for next to nothing, at the Wairoa saw-mills, and got them down to our place. Then we had to hump them up to the ground; no light work, for a load had to be carried often nearly a mile uphill. We purchased a keg or two of nails, and finally fixed up the fence.
We were proud of our clearings when they were new, and we are proud of them still. But they would look strange sort of paddocks to an English farmer's eye. The ground is all hills and hollows, lying on the sides of ranges, or stretching across the gullies. Amidst the grass is a dazzling perspective of black and white stumps, looking like a crop of tombstones, seen endways; and round the whole careers, uphill and down dale, the rough, barbarous, uncouth-looking stake fence. Never mind! Off that gaunt and unseemly tract has come many a good bale of wool, many a fair keg of butter, or portly cheese. What have we to do with trim appearances?
In the course of fencing operations, the Little'un developed a wonderful aptitude for the manufacture of gates. Whether he had learnt the whole art of carpentry from his practice upon a certain chair, elsewhere described, I do not know; but his gates are a marvel of ingenuity, and really very capital contrivances. Only, he is so vain of his performance, that he wishes to put a gate about every hundred yards. A constant warfare is waged upon this point, between him and Old Colonial, who does not seem to approve of gates at all.
In subsequent years we have done something towards making live-fences. We have dug ditches and banks within some of the fences, planting them with thorn, acacia, Vermont damson, Osage orange, and other hedge material. We have now some very good and sightly hedges. Luckily, we never tried whins, or furze, as here called. This is a vile thing. It makes a splendid hedge, but it spreads across the clearing and ruins the grass; and it is the worst of weeds to eradicate.