But I knew better.
From the sublime to the ridiculous we all know the step is but short, especially in the human mind; and to my tender mood succeeds the recollection of an absurd panic we once suffered from, about swaggers.
Exaggerated stories had reached us, brought by timid fat men on horseback, with bulky pocket-books, who came to buy our wethers for the Hokitika market, of "sticking up" having broken out on the west land.

I fear my expressions are often unintelligible to an English reader, but in this instance I will explain.

"Sticking up" is merely a concise colonial rendering of "Your money or your life," and was originally employed by Australian bushrangers, those terrible freebooters whose ranks used to be always recruited from escaped convicts.

Fortunately we had no community of that class, only a few prisoners kept in a little ricketty wooden house in Christchurch, from which an enterprising baby might easily have escaped.

I dare say as we get more civilized out there, we shall build ourselves handsome prisons and penitentiaries; but in those early days a story was current of a certain jailor who let all his captives out on some festal occasion, using the tremendous threat, that whoever had not returned by eight o'clock should be "_locked out!_" But to return to that particular winter evening.