CHAPTER I.
THROUGH THE OTIRA.
The silence and the sunshine creep
With soft caress
O’er billowy plain and mountain steep
And wilderness—
A velvet touch, a subtle breath,
As sweet as love, as calm as death,
On earth, on air, so soft, so fine,
Till all the soul a spell divine
O’er shadoweth.
Out of the town and along the dusty white road lined with trim houses, and gardens aglow with colour: on to country roads less dusty and with fewer and fewer houses, we rode forth one morning. It was six o’clock. The road-side herbage was drenched with dew. A grey-blue haze lay all over the wide Canterbury plains which seemed to stretch away to the farthest horizon, tall gum trees and fir plantations round the homesteads breaking the monotony of their flatness. Everywhere the crops were ripening to harvest; another week’s sunshine and the wheatfields that waved all golden now would be cut. Fruit ripened in the orchards, and summer was at its height.
It was a blue day. All objects, near and far, were tinged with blue under the New Zealand sky, and as the sun got hotter, everything shimmered and trembled in the heat.
We breakfasted at a wayside inn, and rode on
