[Footnote 1:  The Alps, however, show much floral beauty, and the ground-flowers of the Auckland Islands, an outlying group of New Zealand islets, impressed the botanist Kirk as unsurpassed in the South Temperate Zone.]

In the month of February, when the rata flowers in the Alps, there are valleys which are ablaze for miles with

  “Flowers that with one scarlet gleam
  Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
  To set the hills on fire.”

But the most gorgeous of all flowering trees, as distinguished from creepers, is the sea-loving pohutu kawa.  When the wind is tossing its branches the contrast is startling between its blood-red flowers and the dark upper side and white, downy under side of its leaves.

Like the Australians, New Zealand Colonists call their forest “bush.”  What in England might be called bush or brushwood is called “scrub” in the Colonies.

The wood of many of the trees is not only useful timber, but when cut and polished is often beautiful in grain.  Unhappily, their destruction goes on with rapid strides.  The trees, as is usually the case with those the wood of which is hard, grow slowly.  They feel exposure to wind, and seem to need the society and shelter of their fellows.  It is almost impossible to restore a New Zealand forest when once destroyed.  Then most of the finest trees are found on rich soil.  The land is wanted for grazing and cultivation.  The settler comes with axe and fire-stick, and in a few hours unsightly ashes and black funereal stumps have replaced the noble woods which Nature took centuries to grow.  No attempt is made to use a great part of the timber.  The process is inevitable, and in great part needful, frightfully wasteful as it seems.  But the forest reserves of the Colony, large as they are, should be made even more ample.  Twelve hundred thousand acres are not enough—­as the New Zealanders will regretfully admit when a decade or so hence they begin to import timber instead of exporting it.  As for interfering with reserves already made, any legislator who suggests it should propose his motion with a noose round his neck, after the laudable custom followed in a certain classic republic.

New Zealand is by no means a flat country, though there are in it some fair-sized plains, one of which—­that of Canterbury—­is about as flat a stretch of one hundred miles as is to be found in the world.  On the whole, however, both North and South Islands are lands of the mountain and the flood, and not only in this, but in the contour of some of their peaks and coast-line, show more than a fanciful resemblance to the west of Scotland.  But the New Zealand mountains are far loftier than anything in the British Islands.  The rocky coasts as a rule rise up steeply from the ocean, standing out in many places in bold bluffs and high precipices.  The seas round are not shallow, dull, or turbid, but deep, blue, wind-stirred, foam-flecked, and more often than not lit by brilliant