the Kaihu, Kopura,
Tauraroa, and Maungakahia.

We have come into a district admirably adapted for pioneer settlement.
For nature has supplied water-ways in every direction, and thus the
first great difficulty in opening up a new country, the want of roads,
is obviated. Here, indeed, as we shall find, no one walks to his
township, or rides to see a neighbour, he jumps into his boat and rows
or sails wherever he wants to go.

As the _Lily_ steams down the Kaipara, we get a better idea of the bush
than our previous day's coach-ride had given us. There is no more of the
brown and shaggy gum-land, but, instead of it, such glorious woods and
jungles and thickets of strange beautiful vegetation. Mile after mile it
is the same, the dense evergreen forest stretching away over the ranges
as far as one can see. Here it is the light bush, woods of young trees
that have grown over what were once the sites of Maori cultivation;
there it is the heavy bush, the real primeval forest.

One great feature of the Kaipara tidal estuary is the quantity of
mangroves. Immense tracts are covered with water at high tide, and are
left bare at low tide. These mud-banks are covered with mangroves in
many places, forming great stretches of uniform thicket. The mangrove is
here a tree growing to a height of twenty or thirty feet, branching
thickly, and bearing a dark, luxuriant foliage. At high water, the
mangrove swamps present the appearance of thickets growing out of the
water. When the tide recedes, their gnarled and twisted stems are laid
bare, often covered with clinging oysters. Below, in the mud, are
boundless stores of pipi (cockles), and other shell-fish and eels.

The channel of the river is broad and deep, but often, to save some
bend, the _Lily_ ploughs her way along natural lanes and arcades among
the mangroves. It is a novel experience to us to glide along the still
reaches among these fluviatile greenwoods. We are embosomed in a
submerged forest, whose trees are uniform in height and kind. All round
us, like a hedge, is the glossy green foliage, sometimes brushing our
boat on either side. And we scare up multitudes of water fowl, unused to
such invasion of their solitudes. Wild duck, teal, grey snipe, shags,
and many kinds that no one on board knows the names of, start from under
our very bows. Not gay plumaged birds, though, for the most part; only
now and then a pair of kingfishers, flashing green and orange as they
fly, or the p