Page:Tales-of-Banks-Peninsula Jacobson 2ed 1893 cropped.pdf/165

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Stories of Banks Peninsula.

he kept looking for it round the bush, thinking it had escaped, but he saw nothing of it. Several of the neighbors lent him a hand, and a fresh house was put up and the garden renovated a bit, but most of his best apple trees had got killed. He was persuaded to be a teetotaler for a bit, and tried it for a time, but he went to see the Ashburton races in 1873, and being so well known in the district, his acquaintances wished him to have a drink. He explained that he was a teetotaler, but he would have a drink with them, and put it away in a bottle, and this he did until he had several bottles of mixed spirits, which he took back with him, and then commenced to break bulk, and until all was finished there was no work done. Drink and hard living now commenced to tell on this once iron constitution, and a paralytic stroke, from which he suffered, seemed to hasten his end. He went down to see Mrs. Deans, who kindly offered to get him into the Old Men’s Home, but he would not hear of it, so after staying in the Christchurch Hospital for three weeks, and feeling better, he set out home again to the Alford Forest. But he seemed past work, and lived, one may say, on the charity of the neighbors. He left the public-house to proceed home one winter’s evening, and was found dead about half way, with a half empty bottle of spirits beside him. It was supposed that he sat down to have a drink, and, falling asleep, was frozen to death. Thus died penniless in 1874, James Robinson Clough, a man who, with the opportunities he had, should have been a second Rhodes. It may seem strange, but it is nevertheless true, that the end of the subject of this number and that of Walker, both men who were almost the first Europeans on the Peninsula, should have been so similar, both, dying from the immediate effects of drink on the Canterbury Plains.

When living with his two sons, Abner and Robin-