when turned out into the rivers disappears.  The golden carp, however, the perch, and the rainbow trout take readily to New Zealand.  The hare increases in size and weight, and has three and four leverets at a birth.  The pheasant has spread from end to end of the Colony.  The house-fly drives back the loathsome flesh-fly or blue-bottle, to the salvation of blankets and fresh meat.  The Briton of the south has indeed taken with him all that he could of the old country.

[Footnote 1:  The tutu, a danger to inexperienced sheep and cattle, was not eaten by horses.  The berries were poisonous enough to kill an imported elephant on one occasion.  Would that they had done as much for the rabbit!]

He has also brought a few things which he wishes he had left behind.  The Hessian fly, the wire-worm, the flea, and grubs and scale insects thrive mischievously.  The black and grey rats have driven the native rat into the recesses of the forest.  A score of weeds have come, mixed with badly-screened grass-seed, or in any of a hundred other ways.  The Scotch thistle seemed likely at one stage to usurp the whole grass country.  Acts of Parliament failed to keep it down.  Nature, more effectual, causes it to die down after running riot for a few years.  The watercress, too, threatened at one time to choke half the streams.  The sweetbriar, taking kindly to both soil and climate, not only grows tall enough to arch over the head of a man on horseback, but covers whole hillsides, to the ruin of pasture.  Introduced, innocently enough, by the missionaries, it goes by their name in some districts.  Rust, mildew, and other blights, have been imported along with plant and seed.  The rabbit, multiplying in millions, became a very terror to the sheep farmers, is even yet the subject of anxious care and inspection, and only slowly yields to fencing, poison, traps, dogs, guns, stoats, weasels, ferrets, cats, and a host of instruments of destruction.  In poisoning the rabbit the stock-owners have well-nigh swept the native birds from wide stretches of country.  The weka, or wood-hen, with rudimentary wings like tufts of brown feathers, whose odd, inquisitive ways introduce it so constantly to the shepherd and bushman, at first preyed upon the young rabbits and throve.  Now ferrets and phosphorus are exterminating it in the rabbit-infested districts.  Moreover, just as Vortigern had reason to regret that he had called in the Saxon to drive out the Picts and Scots, so the New Zealanders have already found the stoat and weasel but dubious blessings.  They have been a veritable Hengist and Horsa to more than one poultry farmer and owner of lambs.  In addition they do their full share of the evil work of bird extermination, wherein they have active allies in the rats and wild cats.  On the whole, however, though acclimatization has given the Colony one or two plagues and some minor nuisances, it would be ridiculous to pretend that these for a moment weigh in the scale against its good works.