Their speech is that of communities who are seldom utterly illiterate, and as seldom scholarly.  I have listened in vain for any national twang, drawl, or peculiar intonation.  The young people, perhaps, speak rather faster than English of the same age, that is all.  On the other hand, anything like picturesque, expressive language within the limits of grammar is rarely found.  Many good words in daily use in rural England have been dropped in the Colony.  Brook, village, moor, heath, forest, dale, copse, meadow, glade are among them.  Young New Zealanders know what these mean because they find them in books, but would no more think of employing them in speaking than of using “inn,” “tavern,” or “ale,” when they can say “hotel,” “public-house,” or “beer.”  Their place is taken by slang.  Yet if a nation is known by its slang, the New Zealanders must be held disposed to borrow rather than to originate, for theirs is almost wholly a mixture of English, American, and Australian.  Most of the mining terms come from California; most of the pastoral from Australia, though “flat” and “creek” are, of course, American.  “Ranche” and “gulch” have not crossed the Pacific; their place is taken by “run” and “gulley.”  On the other hand, “lagoon” has replaced the English “pond,” except in the case of artificial water.  Pasture is “feed,” herd and flock alike become “mob.”  “Country” is used as a synonym for grazing; “good country” means simply good grazing land.  A man tramping in search of work is a “swagman” or “swagger,” from the “swag” or roll of blankets he carries on his back.  Very few words have been adopted from the vigorous and expressive Maori.  The convenient “mana,” which covers prestige, authority, and personal magnetism; “whare,” a rough hut; “taihoa,” equivalent to the Mexican manana; and “ka pai,” “’tis good,” are exceptions.  The South Island colonists mispronounce their beautiful Maori place-names murderously.  Even in the North Island the average bushman will speak of the pukatea tree as “bucketeer,” and not to call the poro-poro shrub “bull-a-bull” would be considered affectation.  There is or was in the archives of the Taranaki Farmers’ Club a patriotic song which rises to the notable lines—­

  “And as for food, the land is full
  Of that delicious bull-a-bull!”

In Canterbury you would be stared at if you called Timaru anything but “Timmeroo.”  In Otago Lake Wakatipu becomes anything, from “Wokkertip” to “Wackatipoo”; and I have heard a cultured man speak of Puke-tapu as “Buck-a-tap.”

The intellectual average is good.  Thanks in great part to Gibbon Wakefield’s much-abused Company, New Zealand was fortunate in the mental calibre of her pioneer settlers, and in their determined efforts to save their children from degenerating into loutish, half-educated provincials.  Looking around in the Colony at the sons of these pioneers, one finds them on all sides doing useful and honourable work.  They make upright civil servants, conscientious clergymen,