To the flock-owner, however, this severe region is what the beautiful West is not—­it is useful.  Sheep can find pasture there.  And as the mountains decline into hills, and the hills into downs and flats, the covering of herbage becomes less and less scanty.  When the colonists came to the east coast, they found plains and dales which were open, grassy, almost treeless.  Easy of access, and for the most part fertile, they were an ideal country for that unaesthetic person, the practical settler.  Flocks and herds might roam amongst the pale tussock grass of the slopes and bottoms without fear either of man, beast, climate, or poisonous plant.[1] A few wooden buildings and a certain extent of wire fencing represented most of the initial expenses of the pioneer.  Pastoral settlement speedily overran such a land, followed more slowly and partially by agriculture.  The settler came, not with axe and fire to ravage and deform, but as builder, planter and gardener.  Being in nineteen cases out of twenty a Briton, or a child of one, he set to work to fill this void land with everything British which he could transport or transplant His gardens were filled with the flowers, the vegetables, the fruit trees of the old land.  The oak, the elm, the willow, the poplar, the spruce, the ash grew in his plantations.  His cattle were Shorthorns, Herefords, and Devons.  His farm horses were of the best Clydesdale and Suffolk Punch blood.  The grasses they fed upon were mixtures of cocks-foot, timothy, rye-grass, and white clover.  When it was found that the red clover would not flourish for want of penetrating insects, the humble bee was imported, and with compete success, as many a field now ruddy with crimson blossom testifies.  The common English bee is found wild in the forest, where it hives in hollow trees, and robs its competitors—­the honey-eating native birds—­of much of their food.  The hedges round the fields aforesaid are also English, but with a difference.  The stunted furze which beautifies English commons is at the other end of the earth a hedge plant, which makes a thick barrier from five to eight feet high, and, with its sweet-smelling blooms, has made the New Zealand fields “green pictures set in frames of gold.”  The very birds which rise from the clover or wheat, and nest in the trees or hedgerows of furze or quickset, are for the most part English—­the skylark, the blackbird, finches, green and gold, thrushes, starlings, and that eternal impudent vagabond the house-sparrow.  Heavy is the toll taken by the sparrow from the oat-crops of his new home; his thievish nature grows blacker there, though his plumage often turns partly white.  He learns to hawk for moths and other flying insects.  Near Christchurch rooks caw in the windy skies.  Trout give excellent sport in a hundred streams, though in the lakes they grow too gross to take the fly.  Many attempts have so far failed to acclimatise the salmon.  The ova may be hatched out successfully, but the fish