By Lady Barker.
1883
Preface.
These letters, their writer is aware, justly incur the reproach of
egotism and triviality; at the same time she did not see how this was
to be avoided, without lessening their value as the exact account of
a lady's experience of the brighter and less practical side of
colonization. They are published as no guide or handbook for "the
intending emigrant;" that person has already a literature to himself,
and will scarcely find here so much as a single statistic. They simply
record the expeditions, adventures, and emergencies diversifying the
daily life of the wife of a New Zealand sheep-farmer; and, as each was
written while the novelty and excitement of the scenes it describes were
fresh upon her, they may succeed in giving here in England an adequate
impression of the delight and freedom of an existence so far removed
from our own highly-wrought civilization: not failing in this, the
writer will gladly bear the burden of any critical rebuke the letters
deserve. One thing she hopes will plainly appear,--that, however hard
it was to part, by the width of the whole earth, from dear friends and
spots scarcely less dear, yet she soon found in that new country new
friends and a new home; costing her in their turn almost as many parting
regrets as the old.