sunshine.  The climate and colouring, too, are not only essentially un-English, but differ very widely in different parts of the Islands.  For New Zealand, though narrow, has length, stretching through 13 degrees of latitude, and for something like 1,100 miles from north to south.  As might be looked for in a mountainous country, lying in the open ocean, the climate is windy, and except in two or three districts, moist.  It is gloriously healthy and briskly cheerful.  Summed up in one word, its prevailing characteristic is light!

Hot as are many summer days, they are seldom sultry enough to breed the heavy, overhanging heat-haze which shrouds the heaven nearer the tropics.  Sharp as are the frosts of winter nights in the central and southern part of the South Island, the days even in mid-winter are often radiant, giving seven or eight hours of clear, pleasant sunshine.  For the most part the rains are heavy but not prolonged; they come in a steady, business-like downpour, or in sharp, angry squalls; suddenly the rain ceases, the clouds break, and the sun is shining from a blue sky.  Fogs and mists are not unknown, but are rare and passing visitors, do not come to stay, and are not brown and yellow in hue but more the colour of a clean fleece of wool.  They do not taste of cold smoke, gas, sulphur, or mud.  High lying and ocean-girt, the long, slender islands are lands of sunshine and the sea.  It is not merely that their coast-line measures 4,300 miles, but that they are so shaped and so elevated that from innumerable hilltops and mountain summits distant glimpses may be caught of the blue salt water.  From the peak of Aorangi, 12,350 feet in air, the Alpine climber Mannering saw not only the mantle of clouds which at that moment covered the western sea twenty miles away, but a streak of blue ocean seventy miles off near Hokitika to the north-west, and by the hills of Bank’s Peninsula to the north-east, a haze which indicated the Eastern Ocean.  Thus, from her highest peak, he looked right across New Zealand.  The Dutch, then, its discoverers, were not so wrong in naming it Zealand or Sea-land.

Next to light, perhaps the chief characteristic of the country and its climate is variety.  Thanks to its great length the north differs much from the south.  Southland is as cool as northern France, with an occasional southerly wind as keen as Kingsley’s wild north-easter.  But in gardens to the north of Auckland I have stood under olive trees laden with berries.  Hard by were orange trees, figs, and lemon trees in full bearing.  Not far off a winding tidal creek was fringed with mangroves.  Exotic palm trees and the cane-brake will grow there easily.  All over the North Island, except at high altitudes, and in the more sheltered portions of the South Island, camellias and azaleas bloom in the open air.  The grape vine bids fair to lead to wine-making in both islands—­unless the total abstainers grow strong enough to put their foot on the manufacture of alcohol in any form in an already distinctly and increasingly sober Colony.