s. All over New Zealand one meets people who went out there
to die, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, and who are living yet, robust
and hale. The air is fatal to phthisis, as it is also in Australia.
The most terrible foe of the British race is disarmed in these favoured
lands. Take it in the main, the climate of New Zealand is fairly
represented by that of Great Britain. The southern parts remind one
of Scotland, the northern of Devon and Cornwall. The variety of which
Lesser Britain has so much reason to complain is absent. The British
climate is idealised in New Zealand.

This fact alone is one of the utmost importance in the estimation of
the future of the race. In similar environment the British people have
already pretty clearly shown what they can do, and in New Zealand I
found myself absolutely unable to trace the beginning of a variation
from the British breed. Dunedin, allowing for an influx of Southern
Britons, might be Aberdeen; Christ-church, population and all, might
be planted in Warwickshire, and no tourist would know that it was not
indigenous there. They call their local stream the Avon, and boating
there some idle summer days, I easily dreamed myself at home again, and
within bow-shot of the skyward-pointing spire which covers the bones
of Shakespeare. It is, I believe, a fact that the stream is christened
after another river than that which owes its glamour to the poet's name,
but in a case of this kind mere fact matters little, and the inhabitants
themselves are, for the most part, quite willing to ignore it.

It was in New Zealand that I made my first practical acquaintance with
the stage. I have already spoken of that remarkable child actor whom I
brought over to England and introduced to the London public in my own
comedy of _Ned's Chum_. I saw him first in _Little Lord Fauntleroy_,
and I expressed myself in such terms about him to his manager that I was
offered a commission to write a play in which he should be the principal
figure. I was making holiday just then, and having nothing to detain me,
I anchored myself in one of the quietest places in the world and threw
myself into my task with so much vigour that in a fortnight the comedy
was completed, and within a month from its inception was produced at
Auckland. Sir George Grey who was then, though he had long retired from
office, the tutelary genius of the place, supplied me with the means
for the production of such a stage illusion as can har