inside to write our long-delayed letters and diaries, and “so to bed.”
And though next day was not really to be our last—for we had seven more days’ travelling—yet to me it was the end, and when we said good-bye to Ted, it was good-bye to Westland and all it had come to mean to me.
Of Wanaka, among its blue mountains, I will not write; or of that long day riding round the base of the rugged hills that enclose Hawea, where the storms chased each other, lashing the steel-blue waters into foam. Or of the golden evening that followed, when we crossed the Hawea plain and saw the harvesters in blue dungarees binding the yellow corn; or of straight roads leading to little homesteads, dotted about in their formal fir plantations, all rather parched and dusty and bounded by sun-baked hills. I saw it all with a sick longing for the cool dim forest, for the ever-murmuring waters, for the sights and sounds I had learned to love:
“Lost is the sense of noiseless, sweet escape
From dust of stony plains, from sun and gale,
When the feet tread where shade and silence drape
The stems with peace beneath the leafy veil,
Or when a pleasant rustling stirs each shape
Creeping with whisperings that rise and fail
Through labyrinths half-lit by chequered play
Of light on golden moss now burned away.!”
I had entered the promised land. I had seen a world as it was before man came there; in after years it could never be quite the same again. For if I went back to it, I might not find the Fairy Land of my dreams. The forest world must
