1864 - Muter, E. Travels and Adventures of an Officer's Wife in India, China and New Zealand. [NZ Sections only] - CHAPTER XI, p 201-230

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CHAPTER XI.

THE sea rolls up long waves from the south-west, though the wind is easterly, and a dull haze rests on the water--five hundred emigrants peering through the mist for a glimpse of what they call their adopted country. It is the islands to the south of New Zealand, singularly enough called the "Snares," they look for. Being the land first made by vessels running to the southern provinces, and a splendid mark even on the way home from Australia, the "Beacons" would be a far more appropriate name.

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NEW ZEALAND.

We were disappointed in making the Snares, and it was not till the second day that Cape Saunders was seen, when the prevailing wind on this part of the coast, from the north-east, set in, straight against our ship going to Canterbury. We neared the heads of Port Chalmers, till vessels entering and leaving could be distinguished, but not the appearance of the land.

The next point made was close to the infant town of Omaru, and many glasses were levelled to spy out the place. The country bore a uniform colour, varied only by the light and shade of passing clouds, coming out more distinctly where near, and mellowed by the atmosphere where far off. The faint yellow brown rose in long bare sweeps of Downs, or ran in level lines when the plains spread broadly out between the hills. No trees broke the monotony of hue and of outline, but dotted here and there were little houses, standing bare and lonely on the naked hill-sides.

The ship partially opened a rugged bluff, where these little houses seemed to have fallen in a shower, indicating the incipient town of Omaru, the most northerly in the province of Otago. Between some rising ground and the beach, there was a

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broad flat belt, which entered an extensive plain running back far into the interior. Through that plain flows the strong and rapid current of the Wiataki, the boundary between the two great provinces of the island, those of Canterbury and Otago. The country ascending from the sea rose into piles of mountains, and among them were the gold-fields of the Lindis.

What a weary thing it is to beat up a coast, and perhaps most wearisome to people situated as my fellow-passengers! Two days more passed, and we lay becalmed in a vast bight. The top of a string of mountains, like stepping-stones on the horizon, was Bank's Peninsula. A uniform line on the sea, unnoticed if not pointed out, was the Ninety-mile Beach, with the dense and hazy atmosphere over it that tells of heated air and a sandy soil.

I could hear the faint roar of the waves as they fell, and see the smoke rolling from the fires on the land. Far beyond I looked on a great Alpine chain, that seemed to run in a regular line, like a giant wall, begun and ended by what I was told were mountains, but, to me, were more like glittering white clouds, lying low on the sky. One was

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Mount Cook, near the west coast, the other the Kiakoras, near Cook's Straits. As marked on the chart, I could scarcely believe that these mountains, so far from each other, could be seen at the same time, though the former was nearly fourteen thousand, and the latter nearly ten thousand feet above the sea level.

The vast prairie, called the Plains of Canterbury, was between me and that Alpine range.

Two more days have gone, and we now stand close in to Bank's Peninsula. It rises steeply from the water to what, in England, we should think a towering height, shelving up from the ends of the spurs to more than three thousand feet. These ends have been cut away by the waves of the Pacific, so that each bluff terminates in a perpendicular height, beneath which the ocean frets and foams, hollowing it out into caves.

The main portion of the Peninsula is black with a dense forest; but most of these spurs, as they near the sea, have the brown hay colour that marks the grass-land of New Zealand, some of them carrying their bush to the brink of the precipice. A short way back the grass of these ridges changes to wood, not in straggling trees becoming denser, but the

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forest crossing them as if a wall had been built up, the one part an impenetrable shade, the other a bald hill-side.

The dark olive tinge of the trees went over the summits of the mass of mountains. Some of the gorges of the ridges formed sheltered bays, and nooks that might be called vales, while to our left we saw the headlands of the magnificent harbour of Akaroa.

The Peninsula now presented an appearance never before seen. Volumes of smoke rolled up the hill-sides, and hung heavily on the mountain tops, while the air came down hot on us, as from a furnace, and our eyes smarted and watered from the smoke of the burnt wood. After sunset the fires came brightly out, raging in the valleys, on the hill-sides, and on the mountain-tops, a novel sight to the new-comers. Where the flame had caught the fern and long grass-tufts, it marched up the slopes in a red line, like a regiment of soldiers, the forest fires being more stationary and diversified. The glow of the bush that had, been burnt was like a city illuminated, and the forest in flames was like a city in a blaze. The huge totara, coated with a bark which burns like a torch,

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would shoot up a pinnacle of flame--no fitful flash, but a steady glare that lit up the mountain-side.

Then the eye was drawn towards a distant hill, which rose out of the darkness, as if the red light of the rising sun was striking on the side opposite to us. A column of flame then rushed up to the top, turning the peak into a volcano. The ship put about and ran miles away, but still the smoke came thickly on the breeze, and the smell of burnt wood was perceptible fifty miles from the scene.

The morning we entered the harbour of Lyttelton was very bright. The peninsula on the side adjoining the plains loses its woody covering, and assumes the dried grass vegetation, coupled with a rugged and barren aspect, however picturesque to the tourist, far from inviting to the emigrant.

This harbour, its sides rising from the water like walls, with scarce footing for the mountain goat, is one of those deep gorges into which the sea still enters. A rim of hills surrounds it, from which spurs slope into the water near its head. Among these hills are little vales, in the first and most precipitous of which is the town of Lyttelton. It is situated on the right as the vessel enters, about four miles from the heads, and shows all it can boast to the emigrant

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from the deck of his vessel at a glance. Its few hundreds of wooden cottages, from the beach up the gorge, rise over each other, with its red stone church, its bridle-path winding up the ridge, and its road to the plains cut along the precipitous harbour side. The most important of its works is not seen, the tunnel destined to connect the shipping with Christchurch, and as some think, very erroneously in my opinion, to annihilate the pretensions of the place even to the name of a town.

Most persons emigrate without forming even a remote conception of the country to which they go. It is only the educated, and those with powers of imagination, that can fully realize a picture from description. The extent to which people drift abroad, mere things of chance and circumstance, as if guided by tides and winds, would hardly be credited by the nation. They have been trained in a highly-civilized society, they awake, after a dreamy existence of some three months, in a new country, with all that is most repulsive in it thrust prominently upon them.

While their air-built castles are demolished at landing, the hosts of annoyances, the expenses,

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and untoward accidents, fall together on the head of the unfortunates. The drain on their resources is at once felt. They may probably suffer the destruction of their household goods, without even an idea how they are to be replaced. Hence the bitter disappointment that awaits so many. Instances are common of people returning in the vessel that brought them out, and, I believe, such instances would be still more common if some were not restrained by poverty, and others by shame.

The world is apt to regard those who so act as fools, but they must themselves land in a bran-new country like Canterbury before they can fully understand the feelings that prompted the act. To many reared in an old historical and monarchical land like England, there is something repulsive in the very atmosphere of these lately formed provinces, and this feeling I believe to be strongest in women. Their instinct is against, and always will be against, such a move. Nor is the sentiment confined to the higher classes, it is felt as strongly by many servant girls; for if it is difficult for those in better circumstances to escape contact with much that is coarse and vulgar, it is impossible for them.

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Young and energetic men, who dash into the future, seeing in the infant colony scope for a career, quickly reconcile themselves to the change, though it grates on them at first. There is a materialism about these places, a frantic rush after the means of existence, an air tainted with tallow, and hides and dry goods, a want of repose, and little inclination for calm thought and quiet conversation. We see in them the degenerating influence of trade, unredeemed by counteracting tendencies, that influence which has made the Yankee what he is, but which, perhaps, in him may now be purified and ennobled by the fiery heat of war.

On landing from the little steamer the servant-girls became transformed into ladies, and the ploughmen into gentlemen. When our baggage was put on the wharf we felt how really poor a thing is man, the individual and unaided man. Had it been Alexander the Great he would have been in the same predicament, sitting and philosophizing on a trunk too heavy for him to carry. Though the wharf was covered with loungers, there was no assistance to be got, while numbers leant against a public-house, the first, as in all colonies, to open its arms to a new comer,

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and others, with their hands in their pockets, sat smoking on the kerb of the pavement.

We were considered fortunate in getting accommodation at an hotel. A raw Irish girl entered the sitting-room we had secured, to ask if we wanted anything.

"Can we get fish for dinner?"

"No, you can't get fish."

"What soup can you give us?"

"The dinner hour is past, and you cannot now get any soup."

"Have you any veal?"

"Veal, ma'am!" --ma'am for the first time-- exclaimed the girl, amazed. "Is it veal you mean? There is not such a thing in the town."

"Then, as you have neither fish, soup, nor veal, what can I have?"

"What would you like?" returned the imperturbable waiting-woman, as if she possessed the wand she had only to wave to satisfy a whim, She had beef-steaks and mutton-chops, and, though I never succeeded in getting anything else during my residence in Lyttelton, I was daily asked by the smiling damsel what I would like, yet even

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eggs and milk were not always to be procured.

The characteristic features of the country by many of the girls passed unnoticed, while their eyes were fixed in despair on the wooden boxes termed houses; and often when I asked one of my fellow-passengers how she liked the country, she would exclaim,

"These little wooden houses are so funny, I can't get used to them!"

The partitions between the rooms of our hotel being of thin boards covered with calico, on which paper was plastered, every move in the next room was heard. There were two chairs in the apartment allotted to us, and when a third was asked for, a cripple with three legs was brought in, and well-nigh caused the death of a friend for whom it was sent. Steel forks, and a battered lamp, for the new parafin-oil, which I found to be in universal use, and tumblers that looked as if made by the yard and cut into the dozen, stained, too, a muddy hue from the dregs of beer, though in keeping, surely ill-became one of the two best hotels of the port town of a great and rising province like Canterbury.

When the colony was first founded Lyttelton

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was the chief town, and as men accept what is, without speculating on what is to be, it became the capital, though the real capital, Christchurch, only wanted a road and the means of carriage to draw, like a magnet, the citizens, who have nearly all taken to the wing and flown over the hill, leaving the port town desolate.

When the sounds in the bar ceased the place sank into silence, and at intervals through the night I heard the truck from the tunnel shooting its load into the sea. The work which is to place this harbour in communication with the plains, and probably to make the prairie of Canterbury the best field open for emigration on earth, goes on unseen.

My husband walked to the top of the hills, before breakfast, to look at the plains. He had seen them three or four months after the landing of the first colonists, and again at an interval of as many years. Nearly twelve years had now elapsed since his first view.

When the heat had abated in the evening I walked with him up the Bridle Path to the top. On reaching the crest we turned to our left, over some rough sheep-tracks, and gained a projection

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that intercepted the view. Then the country came out in all its magnitude, presenting a landscape of striking grandeur. The plains of India skirted by the Himalayah, those of Lombardy by the Alps, and the slopes of Peru by the Andes, could alone be compared with it. Not that this is equally extensive as these, but the eye can take in no more than is here presented, and no where else could one see over a greater space. The plain curved with the sea, and to the south made its own horizon, the peaks of the mountains falling behind it, till the concave surface of the world withdrew them from the sight, looking like islands beyond the horizon of the land.

The immense track of country between these mountains and the sea had the dried hay look of the grass land, broken in two or three places by clumps of forest, and here and there by the gleam of intensely blue water. After ranging over the far boundaries, the eye became gradually fixed on the central spot, where objects accumulated and became grouped, clustering into the city of Christchurch. Around it the land was changed in hue, and variegated--here green with a sward of English grass, there dark from the soil newly

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turned, then yellow with the stubble of the reaped crop. The fields were hedged off by gorse into triangles, oblongs, and squares, marked by the broad lines of the straight highways, and the narrower ones accommodation roads.

The monotony of these straight lines was somewhat broken by two meandering streams that wound in endless curves through the country, and entered a lagoon that seemed to invade the plain at the foot of the peninsula. The highways could be traced into the city by straggling cottages, more closely connected as they neared the centre; and everywhere farm-houses were dotted about, with their out-buildings and stacks of grain.

What surprised my husband most was to see the number of young trees that partially hid the city, and to perceive plantations over the cultivated portion of the plains.

"Where the railway emerges," said my companion, pointing to the foot of the crest, down which I could trace the Bridle Path, "and crosses the broad drain, curving towards the Heathcote, when I first stood here, was a swamp in which a cow might have been easily drowned. You can trace the Ferry Road into the town, and where the fields are so

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green as you enter the raupa waved its yellow head over a bed of water. The only sign beyond that Christchurch shewed, was a fluttering tent rising from the bare fern, or a V hut standing among the grass tussacks. The colour of the whole was uniform like that of a bog, except where you see that dark mass, the remnant of the Riccarton bush, and another of greater magnitude at Papanui, now wholly gone. So uninviting was the picture to some, that I have known one look suffice for a man, who straightway returned to England. Twelve years have passed, and see the change! What will another decade do? The day is approaching when only the shepherd, or the sportsman in search of a stray deer, or a party picnicking, will look from this height, and wonder, when told, it was thus the pilgrims passed to their promised land, and that the hearts of many sank within them when they gazed on the scene below. It will be difficult for the visitor who then comes here for a bird's-eye view of a great seat of civilization, to picture to himself these plains as the pilgrims saw them, so great will be the difference they will present in a vast city and a highly-cultivated country,

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teeming with life, and all the beauties and appliances of modern improvements."

Our interest lay on the other side of the peninsula, in the harbour of Akaroa, and accepting the warm invitation of kind friends, I accompanied my husband in his passage round in the Geelong. The district is inaccessible to a lady by land, the unformed road leading over the highest and wildest crests of the peninsula. As yet the only steamer on the berth was the Geelong, and she had commenced running but a year, and touched but once a fortnight. Much progress could not be looked for in a place so lately opened. However, I was led to expect great natural beauties.

The appointed time for the Geelong to start was two o'clock, yet it was half-past four when she left. She steamed slowly, and it was near midnight before we entered the harbour, where we were met by a wind blowing hard from the expanding atmosphere around a forest on fire, so that it was later still when she reached her anchorage.

The appearance of the peninsula from the deck of the emigrant ship was sufficiently startling-- from the deck of the Geelong, entering Akaroa, it was something awful. Since my first view the

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fires had not only continued to rage, but to increase; and now from every side down the great basin they were in full march to the sea. The Harbour seemed a mere funnel for the escape of the smoke and the heated air; while around the furnace glowed square miles of forest in flames.

A family accompanied us, fellow-passengers of ours from England, who had taken service with our friends, and I can understand the horror and amazement that must have arisen in their minds on finding themselves at midnight surrounded by such a scene.

After spending the remainder of the night at an hotel, we walked to the house of our friends, where every preparation was in progress to turn or check the flames advancing towards their property, or, if unsuccessful, to carry away their most valuable effects. For the two last nights they had watched the direction taken by the fires with the keenest interest, and now nearly all hope had left them. The flames were absolutely roaring up the glen, and down the fern hills, progressing on both sides towards the town. They were enveloped in the fires.

The inhabitants could be seen in lines beating

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out the flames with large boughs of trees, or hurrying in groups to check the inroad of their foe in some new and unexpected quarter. These flames were mere sharp-shooters, thrown out from the main body that besieged the place, with whom it would have been absolute folly to attempt to battle. As if amused at the terror they created, these fires continued to roar for a week in the gullies, detaching a party now and then over some unburnt fern, and rousing the people into activity. Then having devoured all the decaying vegetable substances about, they retired slowly from the locality, leaving strongly impressed on the minds of the settlers a conviction of the necessity for more extensive clearing around their homes.

The harbour of Akaroa is a fine sheet of water, about eleven miles in length, and varying in breadth from one to three or four. Like that of Lyttelton, it is formed by an amphitheatre of hills, though on a far larger and grander scale, land-locked and free from rocks, and all impediments to shipping. From the circular chain ridges shelve to the water, some forming bluff head-lands, that run far into the harbour, with bays between. These become vales, where the water ceases and the land begins,

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narrowing by degrees as they go back, and breaking into gorges, each terminating in precipices, with the mountain summits encircling the harbour above them.

A perennial rivulet flows through each gorge, all of which unite, in the vale and form a stream, where an English boy would expect to fill his basket with trout. The streams consist of cold, clear, and excellent water, rushing in cataracts down the hill-sides, circling into deep pools, dashing up against high mossy cliffs, and roaring over great stones and boulders.

The forest covers most of these valleys and ridges with a network of vegetation, so dense as to render a passage impossible, except along a worn foot-path. This vegetation was the most vigorous I had ever seen, looking as if the plants that loved the soil had seized on it, and interwoven themselves into a mass for the purpose of resisting all intruders. Fire was apparently the only enemy they had to fear. Huge trunks rose thickly, like pillars supporting the mass. Here was a light coloured stem of immense girth, with a shaggy bark in ribs along it, not very high, yet spreading out a great head of evergreen leaves, and an equally great net-work of roots

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along the surface of the ground. This was the totara. Then came one with a hard black-coloured bark, marked with dents, as if beaten with a hammer. The next was tall and straight, without branches, but with a thin tuft at the head. The stem was lost in creepers encircling. it, parasites of different varieties, twining into each other, as well as round the tree, and coming out in festoons from its branches, or lacing themselves into the neighbouring boughs.

The variety was immense, and they were at every stage of growth--some hoary and decayed, some in full vigour, others mere sprouts. The dead mostly lay rotting on the ground, half hidden in orchids and mosses and fungus, and overgrown with ferns. Many had been arrested in their fall by their brethren, and were still supported in an inclining position; others stood erect, white and lifeless. Under this shade there was a lesser vegetation, chief among which was a crooked stem with a cream-coloured bark, and few leaves, called the fuschia, and the tree fern, spreading out overhead a fan of delicate tracery; while there were numberless shrubs, whose massive formation and density of leaves shewed that they were old, though small.

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Beneath this the ground was alive with under-growth, the principal place in the lowest layer being taken by ferns of all classes. Throughout the whole the supple-jack twined, borrowing and giving strength to the numberless creepers running from tree to tree in inextricable confusion. A thin cord of one of these would throw back a man who walked against it, while he looked with contempt at the impediment which barred his way. The damp was like that of a vault, and the silence profound, except when broken by the song of birds, the whir-r-r of the pigeon taking to the wing, and the murmur of the brook in the hollow. Tame little robins, but without the redbreast, hopped on the pathway before the visitor, inviting and welcoming him to the novel region, and looking only for a little encouragement to perch on his shoulder. The tuis, with their white bands, to which they owe their name of parson birds, grasp a twig and peer down at the intruders, while the stately pigeon, one of the most beautiful birds I have seen, sits like a monarch on a bough, placidly looking at the gun raised for its destruction.

Such is the forest that gives its dark olive and evergreen colour to the hills of the peninsula; but

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it is doomed, and its days are numbered. Already around the harbour it has lost its characteristic features, the axe of the sawyer having felled the trunks, the shade and mainstay of the greenwood, leaving the dried branches and decaying timber to form the train that resulted in the fire raging for the last month, sweeping bare thousands of acres, and covering the ground with ashes many inches deep. The hue of large portions had changed to a russet brown, and the rocks of the underwooded summits were black with smoke.

When I first saw this forest in the valley of German Bay the flames could scarcely be said to be extinguished, for isolated trees still smoked where they stood, and the black ground was here and there like a baker's oven, the fire having followed the roots of the totara along the surface into the earth, and glowing a bright red far down in deep holes, pursuing the tree like its bitterest enemy, till not a vestige of it remained. Now and then the woods rang with the crash of a falling pine, making it dangerous to penetrate them. It was also very disagreeable, for my dress was blackened with the charred supple-jacks rising in numberless little black prongs.

The town stands on the right of the harbour,

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about six miles from the entrance, straggling along a beach, backed by three gorges, each wooded and sending to the sea its own rivulet. It has one main road, for street it certainly cannot yet be called, almost a mile in length, with three back roads penetrating up the three gorges. It looks across the harbour, at the widest part, on a chain of most rugged mountains, covered partly with scrub, partly with grass, partly with fern. The view up to the head of the bay is intercepted by a grassy bluff that runs far into the water, separating the town from the neighbouring valley of German Bay. Over this, however, can be seen the rim of mountains that encircle the harbour, clad in their evergreen robe.

The soil is of great fertility, and the climate being warmer, more moist, and less exposed to high winds than on the plains, seems to nourish European plants with the same vigour and astonishing growth with which it fosters its own spontaneous vegetation. Such a combination of mountain, wood, and water, with so genial a climate and so fertile a soil, could not but form very lovely scenery, yet there is an air of decay and ruin that mars and blots the beauty of the whole, as if

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nature's too bountiful gifts had been met by man, as they often are, with indolence, want of enterprise, and neglect.

Akaroa was founded by the French, and is one of the oldest of the settled districts. Its formation marked an epoch of great peril, as New Zealand then narrowly escaped becoming a convict colony of France. The Nanti-Bordelaise Company, to whom had been entrusted the formation of the settlement, transferred their rights over this portion of the peninsula to the Canterbury Association; but the harbour, though the finest in the island, being inaccessible from the plains, was of little use to the province in any material way. It was therefore neglected till the rapid increase of wealth and population in the city of Christchurch led to the necessity for a watering place, and for change of air to the dusty, hot, and overworked citizens. For this purpose nature seems to have formed Akaroa, its limited view and placid land-locked blue water, coming with a change and freshness, most grateful to the plain-wearied settlers of Canterbury.

The season was too late for gooseberries, raspberries, currants, and strawberries, but the trees were loaded with peaches, plums, and nectarines,

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and the apples and pears were rapidly ripening. It was astonishing to see vegetables and plants profusely flowering amidst the wildest neglect, which in England would have required the nicest skill of the gardener. The trees were all standards, and the boughs were weighed down by a quantity of the finest fruit, greater than they could carry, however careless the cultivation of the garden.

There was a period when this harbour was one of importance, indeed, the chief resort of a large whaling fleet; but the whaling days are gone, and the time approaches when these poor hunted fish may safely sleep in the stormy seas of the south. Now the district is supported by the export of timber, of cheese, and of fruit. The cattle were sleek and fat, and the cream and butter of excellent quality. The harbooka is as large and as good in flavour as any cod; there was a very superior plaice; cray-fish are common, and oysters numerous on the rocks, but I saw no other fish, nor crabs, nor lobsters.

The small supply is brought to market by the Maories, of whom there are a few located in this harbour. Nearly all the natives in Canterbury live on the bays of the peninsula. They have

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a village in each of the principal ports, as well as one on the plains at Kiapoi. A few are settled in the unknown and mysterious country of the west coast. All of them, however, put together, would make up but a few hundreds.

The road to Lyttelton, as yet only partly formed, leads over the ridges and across the valleys on the right, to the head of the harbour, where it slopes up to the lowest part of a saddle on the circular rim. Arriving at the crest, it breaks into two branches--the one to Pigeon Bay, the route for the mail, which is carried twice a week; the other to Purau, opposite the town of Lyttelton. A third branch is contemplated, to lead into the large valley of Little River, whence a tramway, skirting Lake Ellesmere, will enter the plains, connecting the valuable forest district with the town of Christchurch.

The Purau line is about eighteen miles of the wildest path the mind of man can conceive, grand to sublimity in its scenery, and so characteristic of New Zealand, that it well repays the toil and even danger of the ascent, when made on horseback. The way leads along the crest of ranges more than three thousand feet high, here dropping into a hollow, there rising into a peak. Now it comes

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out on open grassy land covered with the universal tussacks, and shewing a fertile soil and genial vegetation, except where the heights rise to a cone crowned with frowning rocks. Numerous sheep graze on these spaces, though not of great extent. Emerging from the forest on the clear summits, the province of Canterbury lies mapped out before the traveller, as if he had a gigantic chart at his feet.

His first view is of the pedestal on which he stands, the peninsula, with its harbours, bays, and valleys, branching out into numerous promontories, capes, and points, like a great crab with its claws spread out, and he the pigmy speck upon its back. Although far larger than the Isle of Wight, it is a mere atom in the view around him. The blue waters of Akaroa glance from between the light russet hills that run into the harbour; and, from the back of the rugged range before the town, come long grass slopes, that form Piraki and other bays, ending in the wide gorge of Little River. In this valley is a lake which takes up its breadth between the hills. Then comes a sweep of open land, which becomes timbered, and breaks into two main gorges, the dense forest

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coming up the hills to the crest of the range.

A goodly-sized stream can be traced through the open flat into the lake. On the other side of Akaroa the hills rise in confusion, robed in their olive green, till the eye is arrested by the estuary of Pigeon Bay. From the back-bone where the traveller stands, the slopes to the right end in Pigeon Bay and Port Levi, while those to the left form the long valley of Kiatouna, and others that open on the plain, or on the vast sheet of water forming Lake Ellesmere.

All round this portion of the peninsula spreads the Pacific, with clouds resting on the water, and breezes rippling the surface; at one place dark from a passing shower, at another bright with sunshine. The traveller looks over thousands of square miles of the ocean, on which he may distinguish vessels without being able to form the faintest idea of their size.

Magnificent as is this view, it sinks to insignificance compared with the grandeur of plain and mountain to be seen beyond. He finds his pedestal connected with the prairie only in a less degree than with. the ocean, many of its claws resting on a plain, to his eye as level and as extensive.

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A heavy fall of snow has covered the ranges with a fresh mantle, and the Alpine chain comes out white, pure, and dazzlingly beautiful, conveying to the mind the idea of gigantic magnitude. And the plain is worthy of its frame. The eye embraces as many thousand square miles of land as it does of ocean.

The ground in the immediate vicinity of the traveller is, in itself, singular enough. In England vegetation at such a height--if there were such a height--would altogether cease, and, in most countries, become of a low order. Here the forest is as luxuriant, the tussacks as numerous, and the fern as thick, as in the vales below. Indeed, it is one of the peculiarities of New Zealand, that the earth on the elevated plateaux is often the best, and the vegetation most luxuriant. The trees were low, though the trunks were large, the branches being apparently fixed in such an attitude as if a roaring tempest had rushed up the gorge and endeavoured to tear them from the ground. These trunks were gray, gnarled, and hoary. A bed of beautiful mosses hung in elaborate tracery, and tiny ferns in every variety, to delight the fanciers of these plants. Occasionally clover would sprout out on the path--

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the white clover, that threatens, in its amazing growth, to cover the whole island.

No imagination can picture landscapes so different in character as that furnished by the peninsula, and that, which we behold on the plains.