, or Ireland,
or Wales would look quite tame and domesticated contrasted with these
rugged solitudes. Not a house nor a hut anywhere, not a trace of the
presence of man, not even--so it chanced--another sail upon the sea!

It is close upon sunset, the foresail is backed, the pilot's signal is
flying, and the foghorn sounding, and soon we shall see if there is any
life or not in this weird new land. Presently, comes a shout of "Ship
ahoy! ahoy!" apparently from the sea, and a little boat emerges from the
shadow of the shore and makes its way alongside.

Of course every one rushes to the side to see the pilot come aboard. It
being more than three months since we saw a strange face, we are
naturally consumed with a burning curiosity. It is rather disappointing
though, to have come half round the world only to be met by men like
these. The pilot might be own brother to his fellow-craftsman who took
us down the Channel, and his crew are just the same kind of brawny,
bearded, amphibious-looking men that are to be seen any day in an
English seaport. We had nourished an insane kind of hope that we should
have been boarded by a canoe full of Maoris, in all the savage splendour
of tattooing and paint and feathers; but here, instead of all that
romantic fancy, are three or four ordinary "long-shore" boatmen, with a
pilot who steps on board in the most matter-of-fact manner possible.

Well, we must make the best we can out of the circumstances; so, when
the pilot has come out of the captain's cabin, where he has shown his
certificate and discussed his "nobbler," when he has formally taken
charge of the ship, and we are once more moving through the water, we
begin to pester him with the question, "What's the news?"

Now, as we have been between three and four months at sea, isolated from
the rest of the world, we are naturally all agog to hear what has
happened in our absence. New Zealand's news of the old world is at least
a month old, but then that is considerably in advance of our dates. The
pilot has, therefore, enough to do in answering all the questions that
are levelled at him, and as he is probably pretty well accustomed to
similar experiences, he is, I fear, in the habit of allowing his fancy
to supply any gaps in his actual knowledge of the progress of events;
hence we glean many scraps of information that on further inquiry turn
out to be more or less imaginative.

And now that we are entering the harbour of Auckland,