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 summer wind-sighs as it moved among the
pines and birches overhead. Its lightness was its most striking
peculiarity. You felt as if your lungs could never weary of
inhaling deep breaths of such an air. Warm without oppression, cool
without a chill. I can find nothing but paradoxes to describe it.