New Zealand is a land of streams of every size and kind, and almost all these streams and rivers have three qualities in common—­they are cold, swift, and clear.  Cold and swift they must be as they descend quickly to the sea from heights more or less great.  Clear they all are, except immediately after rain, or when the larger rivers are in flood.  In flood-time most of them become raging torrents.  Many were the horses and riders swept away to hopeless death as they stumbled over the hidden stony beds of turbid mountain crossings in the pioneering days before bridges were.  Many a foot-man—­gold-seeker or labourer wandering in search of work—­disappeared thus, unseen and unrecorded.  Heavy were the losses in sheep and cattle, costly and infuriating the delays, caused by flooded rivers.  Few are the old colonists who have not known what it is to wait through wet and weary hours, it might be days, gloomily smoking, grumbling and watching for some flood to abate and some ford to become passable.  Even yet, despite millions spent on public works, such troubles are not unknown.

It is difficult, perhaps, for those living in the cool and abundantly watered British Islands to sympathise with dwellers in hotter climates, or to understand what a blessing and beauty these continual and never-failing watercourses of New Zealand seem to visitors from sultrier and drier lands.  The sun is quite strong enough to make men thankful for this gift of abundant water, and to make the running ripple of some little forest rivulet, heard long before it is seen through the green thickets, as musical to the ears of the tired rider as the note of the bell-bird itself.  Even pleasanter are the sound and glitter of water under the summer sunshine to the wayfarer in the open grassy plains or valleys of the east coast.  As for the number of the streams—­who shall count them?  Between the mouths of the Mokau and Patea rivers—­a distance which cannot be much more than one hundred miles of coast—­no less than eighty-five streams empty themselves into the Tasman Sea, of which some sixty have their source on the slopes or in the chasms of Mount Egmont.  Quite as many more flow down from Egmont on the inland side, and do not reach the sea separately, but are tributaries of two or three larger rivers.

It is true that travellers may come to the Islands and leave them with no notion of a New Zealand river, except a raging mountain torrent, hostile to man and beast.  Or they may be jolted over this same torrent when, shrunk and dwindled in summer heat to a mere glittering thread, it meanders lost and bewildered about a glaring bed of hot stones.  But then railways and ordinary lines of communication are chiefly along the coasts.  The unadventurous or hurried traveller sticks pretty closely to these.  It happens that the rivers, almost without exception, show plainer features as they near the sea.

He who wishes to see their best must go inland and find them as they are still to be found in the North Island, winding through untouched valleys, under softly-draped cliffs, or shadowed by forests not yet marred by man.  Or, in the South Island, they should be watched in the Alps as, milky or green-tinted, their ice-cold currents race through the gorges.