ng or sitting with his back to me whilst repeating his lessons.
Nothing would induce him to face me. The moment it became his turn to
go on with the chapter out of the Bible, with which we commenced our
studies, that instant he turned his broad shoulders towards me, and I
could only, hear the faintest murmurs issuing from the depths of a great
beard. Remonstrance would have scared my shy pupil away, so I was fain
to put up with his own method of instruction.

But this is a digression, and I want to make you see with my eyes the
beautiful glimpses of distant country lying around the bold wooded
cliff on which we were standing. The ground fell away from our feet so
completely in some places, that we could see over the tops of the high
trees around us, whilst in others the landscape appeared framed in an
arch of quivering foliage. A noisy little creek chattered and babbled as
it hurried along to join its big brother down below, and kept a fringe
of exquisite ferns, which grew along its banks, brightly green by its
moisture. Each tree, if taken by itself, was more like an umbrella than
anything else to English eyes, for in these primitive forests, where
no kind pruning hand has ever touched them, they shoot up, straight and
branchless, into the free air above, where they spread a leafy crown out
to the sunbeams. Beneath the dense shade of these matted branches grew
a luxuriant shrubbery, whose every leaf was a marvel of delicate beauty,
and ferns found here a home such as they might seek elsewhere in vain.
Flowers were very rare, and I did not observe many berries, but these
conditions vary in different parts of the beautiful middle island.

That was a fair and fertile land stretching out before us, intersected
by the deep banks of the Rakaia, with here and there a tiny patch of
emerald green and a white dot, representing the house and English grass
paddock of a new settler. In the background the bush-covered mountains
rose ever higher and higher in bolder outline, till they shook off
their leafy clothing, and stood out in steep cliffs and scaurs from the
snow-clad glacier region of the mountain range running from north to
south, and forming the back bone of the island. I may perhaps make you
see the yellow, river-furrowed plains, and the great confusion of
rising ground behind them, but cannot make you see, still less feel, the
atmosphere around, quivering in a summer haze in the valley beneath, and
stirred to the faintest