The Tale of a Pioneer Piano.

“Far away and long ago,” far down the coast of South Westland, in a settler's house on the bank of a swift Alpine river, I saw a piano, a strange item of furniture in those parts. I fancy it was then the only instrument of the kind south of Okarito, a hundred miles to the north. Nowadays that bush backblocks strip between Alps and the surf of the Tasman Sea is more in touch with the outside world. But when I was last there, riding through the rough country of forest and torrent to the Haast Pass and Lake Wanaka, South Westland was the most isolated region imaginable. That piano, “how come?” The owner, a bachelor cattle - farmer, couldn't play it, neither could anyone else within many miles. It stood there in the largest room in the house, and it was used as a rack for the owner's saddles. The story we heard well on towards midnight, before a big fire, in the next-door farmhouse, half-a-day's ride away.

The lone-handed settler, a few years before our look-in at his large bush clearing and his more than half-wild cattle, had imported that piano for a bride, who had yet to be imported. He yearned for a wife to brighten his solitary life, and as all the bush lasses within a hundred miles were already bespoken, there was nothing for it but to send abroad for one. A matrimonial advertisement for the Hokitika paper was composed after consultation with the neighbour, on whose advice four little words were added to it: “No Milking. Piano Kept.” By the same packhorse mail to the north went an order to Hokitika for a piano, price no object. It must be a high-class piano fit for a lady to play. Then the bachelor waited for the steamer, three months hence; piano must of course be in hand before the wife.