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Updated: May 10, 2025
I have done so; but in that particular jungle, buried beneath the soil, were the ruins of old houses. When did it begin to attach itself to the works of man, to walls and buildings? And why? Does it derive peculiar sustenance from the lime of the masonry? I think not, for it grows in lands where lime is rare, and in the shadow of log-huts.
The winter came on, and snow covered the ground, but the axemen went on with their labours, and the tall trunks they felled could now with greater ease be dragged either to the saw-mill, to the spots where log-huts were to be erected, to form snake fencing, or to the great heaps prepared for burning.
They built their log-huts in the wildwood clearings, but their hearts were in the sheiling, the cabin, the cottage they had left beyond the sea. Their allegiance was divided, a fact of which the perpetuation of the various national societies is indubitable evidence. They were the pioneers; they made the wilderness a garden; and their children entered into a large inheritance.
Many of the people spent their first winter in log-huts, bark camps, and tents covered with spruce, or rendered habitable only by the heavy banks of snow which were piled against them. A number of persons died through exposure, and "strong, proud men" to quote the words of one who lived in those sorrowful days "wept like children and lay down in their snow-bound tents to die."
From the accounts we had read and received, we had pictured Auckland to our minds as little better than a collection of log-huts, with here and there, perhaps, a slightly more comfortable frame-house. And here is the reality. A city that would put to shame many an old English town.
The eight principal branches and the hundred minor channels and outlets of the Delta, breaking up the land into a labyrinth of hundreds of islets, are then blended together in one watery surface, out of which only the crests of these islets emerge with isolated villages, with log-huts and long whitewashed buildings, and high-domed churches, all dammed and diked up like the town itself Tartar villages, Calmuck villages, Cossack villages, all or most of them fishers' homes and fishing establishments a population of 20,000 to 30,000 souls being thus scattered on the bare sand-hills and dunes; men of all race, colour, and faith, all employed in the same fishing pursuit; the Tartars and Calmucks usually as rank and file, the Russians and other Europeans as overseers, foremen, and skilled labourers.
These pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown.
It would look very busy and thriving in this little place, to-day, but for the Sabbath stillness which broods over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the smoke ascends more faintly than usual from the chimneys of these abundant log-huts and scanty framed houses, and since three o'clock yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world's work has been done.
Some of these good people dwelt in log-huts, with the black forest all around them, on the steep and difficult hill-sides. Others had their homes in comfortable farm-houses, and cultivated the rich soil on the gentle slopes or level surfaces of the valley.
Doubtless its founders thought they had done wonders when they erected this humble looking place of worship; but now, when their descendants have become rich, and the village of log-huts and frame buildings has grown into a populous, busy, thriving town, and this red, tasteless building is too small to accommodate its congregation, it should no longer hold the height of the hill, but give place to a larger and handsomer edifice.
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