is as different to the sharp dry air of the
Canterbury ranges as velvet is to canvas; it soothes, and in hot
weather relaxes. The black birch with dark trunk, spreading branches,
and light leaves, is now mingled with the queenly rimu, and the stiff,
small-leaved, formal white pine. Winding and hanging plants festoon
everything, and everything is bearded with long streamers of moss,
not grey but rich green and golden. Always some river rushes along in
sight or fills the ear with its noise. Tree ferns begin to appear and
grow taller and taller as the coach descends towards the sea, where in
the evening the long journey ends.

On the western coast glaciers come down to within 700 feet of the
sea-level. Even on the east side the snow is some 2,000 feet lower
than in Switzerland. This means that the climber can easily reach the
realm where life is not, where ice and snow, rock and water reign, and
man feels his littleness.

Though Aorangi has been ascended to the topmost of its 12,349 feet,
still in the Southern Alps the peaks are many which are yet unsealed,
and the valleys many which are virtually untrodden. Exploring parties
still go out and find new lakes, new passes, and new waterfalls. It
is but a few years since the Sutherland Falls, 2,000 feet high, were
first revealed to civilized man, nor was there ever a region better
worth searching than the Southern Alps. Every freshly-found nook and
corner adds beauties and interests. Falls, glaciers and lakes are on a
grand scale. The Tasman glacier is eighteen miles long and more than
two miles across at the widest point; the Murchison glacier is more
than ten miles long; the Godley eight. The Hochstetter Fall is a
curtain of broken, uneven, fantastic ice coming down 4,000 feet on to
the Tasman glacier. It is a great spectacle, seen amid the stillness
of the high Alps, broken only by the occasional boom and crash of a
falling pinnacle of ice.

Of the many mountain lakes Te Anau is the largest, Manapouri the
loveliest. Wakatipu is fifty-four miles long, and though its surface
is 1,000 feet above the sea-level, its profound depth sinks below it.
On the sea side of the mountains the fiords rival the lakes in depth.
Milford Sound is 1,100 feet deep near its innermost end.

But enough of the scenery of the Colony. This is to be a story, not a
sketch-book. Enough that the drama of New Zealand's history, now in
the second act, has been placed on one of the most remarkable and
f