named, zig-zagging to and fro.  The dark blue tui, called parson bird, from certain throat-feathers like white bands, will sing with a note that out-rivals any blackbird.  The kuku, or wild pigeon, will show his purple, copper-coloured, white and green plumage as he sails slowly by, with that easy, confiding flight that makes him the cheap victim of the tyro sportsman.  The grey duck, less easy to approach, rises noisily before boat or canoe comes within gunshot.  The olive and brown, hoarse-voiced ka-ka, a large, wild parrot, and green, crimson-headed parakeets, may swell the list.  Such is a “papa” river! and there are many such.

Features for which the traveller in New Zealand should be prepared are the far-reaching prospects over which the eye can travel, the sight and sound of rapid water, and the glimpses of snow high overhead, or far off—­glimpses to be caught in almost every landscape in the South Island and in many of the most beautiful of the North.  Through the sunny, lucid atmosphere it is no uncommon thing to see mountain peaks sixty and eighty miles away diminished in size by distance, but with their outlines clearly cut.  From great heights you may see much longer distances, especially on very early mornings of still midsummer days.  Then, before the air is heated or troubled or tainted, but when night seems to have cooled and purged it from all impurity, far-off ridges and summits stand out clean, sharp and vivid.  On such mornings, though standing low down by the sea-shore, I have seen the hills of Bank’s Peninsula between sixty and seventy miles off, albeit they are not great mountains.  Often did they seem to rise purple-coloured from the sea, wearing “the likeness of a clump of peaked isles,” as Shelley says of the Euganean hills seen from Venice.  On such a morning from a hill looking northward over league after league of rolling virgin forest I have seen the great volcano, Mount Ruapehu, rear up his 9,000 feet, seeming a solitary mass, the upper part distinctly seen, blue and snow-capped, the lower bathed and half-lost in a pearl-coloured haze.  Most impressive of all is it to catch sight, through a cleft in the forest, of the peak of Mount Egmont, and of the flanks of the almost perfect cone curving upward from the sea-shore for 8,300 feet.  The sentinel volcano stands alone.  Sunrise is the moment to see him when his summit, sheeted with snow, is tinged with the crimson of morning and touched by clouds streaming past in the wind.  Lucky is the eye that thus beholds Egmont, for he is a cloud-gatherer who does not show his face every day or to every gazer.  Almost as fine a spectacle is the sight of the “Kaikouras,” or “Lookers-on.”  When seen from the deck of a coasting steamer they seem almost to hang over the sea heaving more than 8,000 feet below their summits.  Strangely beautiful are these mighty ridges when the moonlight bathes them and turns the sea beneath to silver.  But more, beautiful are they still in the calm and glow of early morning, white down to the waist, brown to the feet with the sunshine full on their faces, the blue sky overhead, and the bluer sea below.