“Mrs Greendays is more than kind,” returned Colonel Deane, with a smile. “But Rotorua is a most demoralising place, and I know I should forfeit good opinions in twenty-four hours, for I should want to go fishing too. But if you keep to your present programme and go down the Wanganui in about a fortnight, I will try to join you then, if you will allow me!”
This glorious news was a grand stirrup-cup to us all, for every one of us had been feeling dismal at the break-up of our partie-carree. And so joy reigned in our “bird-cage,” as they call the compartments in the corridor carriages out here, and we were able to look forward to our coming experience with almost unmixed pleasure again.
The first part of that journey recalls little to my mind but an impression of vivid green under a cloudless sky; we flew along through slightly hilly country threaded by a beautiful willow-bordered river, the Waikato, stopping at what seemed very short intervals, considering our train was called express, at funny little stations with unpronounceable Maori names. Occasionally we saw a few Maoris, but I could not realise that they belonged to that romantic race, for they were dressed like Europeans, and did not look in the least interesting, not even being tattooed.
Towards the afternoon we left the valley, and began to climb slowly up a rather steep gradient. And quite suddenly we were in a dense forest, whose undergrowth was simply astonishing in its luxuriance and variety. I could not sit tamely in the carriage, but had to go out on to the little platform between the cars so that I could see both sides at once.
The trees themselves were so many and so various, nearly all of them new to me, too, that one would have thought their roots would prevent any other plants living near them. But there was evidently no repressing the New Zealand vegetation. There were shrubs and ferns, creepers and mosses, in bewildering confusion under the trees, and not only under, but on them, for their trunks and branches were clothed in mosses, with, frequently, clumps of reedy-looking plants growing from the branches, as well as ferns and convolvulus twining round them.
The guard, seeing my interest in the forest, came out and told me the names of many of the trees, and explained their value and some of their characteristics, and I was so engrossed in his conversation that I did not pause to consider what Mrs. Greendays, who is terribly conventional, would have thought had she seen me thus engaged.
The tree-fern was most wonderful, growing to hitherto undreamed heights, with a million lesser relations humbly living in attendance below. A delightful heathery shrub was called “manuka”; this, said the guard, grew into trees, and was to be found everywhere in New Zealand, and also in Australia, where it has the less euphonious name of ‘Ti-tree.’ And an extraordinary thing, part tree, part climber, the rata, is a sort of forest-vampire that twines itself round any tree that attracts its baleful attention, and slowly but surely crushes the
