AX OLD COLONIST.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 13111, 9 May 1908, Page 10

AX OLD COLONIST.

TO THE EDITOR OF "THE I'XEM " ! Sir, —It is especially pleasant—in the abstract, and iwm vile- point of view of one claiming, as 1 do. a membership of the ■'happy band - ' of those f out into the wilderness" of Now Zeaia;id in the cany fifties —to observe "•l'n-.ss" records relating to those* brave and enterprising people who emigrated to th<» Antipodes upwards of hail a century bark. 'I has 1 was deeply interested to rend the paragraph in your issue of i"<?bruarv i2tn last relating to the late Mrs Fimton (nee Lister), thie giving mc the first intimation, of the lady's decease, as well an no little important- iniormation regarding experiences ot the teuton family in the years succeeding tho time when circumstances had caused them to pass beyond my ken, say, as from September, ISoii, when news reached mc on tho Plains from '•far south'' that a won and heir had come into tho world. And yet, after accompanying Miss Lister toLytteiton —;wt Dunedm—from London* in rho Duke of Portland in 1852, 1 spent ot years almost continuously in tne liritain of the South, witJi a icw breaks tlirown in in tho shape of some visits to .Melbourne, Port .Natal, etc. I may add that, scarcely had we cast anchor about October 2:>Mi,- 1852, in Port Lyueltob, than the Rev. Fenton —already Mis* Lister's fiancee —came on board, and within little more than ' twenty-four hours of our first arrival my late father—tho Roy. Chas. Mackie, who was chaplain of the ship under her charterers, the Canterbury Association,had the honour of officiating in Lyttclton at the Fen ton —Lister marriage. TJio young lady had gone out on our tedious 135 days' voyage under my mother's chapcronage. I had understood from the first., though somewhat vaguely—for 1 had not then quite readied tho middle of my " 'teens" — that Mr Fenton was appointed to, or destined for, some clerical post in Otago, and thus that their permaiien.t home was to bo somewhere to the south of the Wiaiia-ki river. But tho p-air remained in J/yttolton—presumably in order to spond (their honeymoon within the pale of civilisation—at least uwtil the close of 1852; and tho last tha-t I saw of Mr .and Mrs teuton was pear —or on—Canterbury's second anniversary, when my laite brother and 1 I— beuig detained in Port for tho nighty in conJKK-tion with a mob of sheep just landed from Sydney, which our father had purchased, and of which we were taking delivery—had tea with theso excejienrt people, and afterwards accompanied them to a farewell conec-rt given to John Robert Godlov just before his doparturo for England.— Yours, etc., C. STRICKLAND MACKIE. The Croft, Rjc, Sussex. March 25th.