The neat hedges, sometimes of gorse and sometimes of hawthorn, looked quaintly incongruous when the farms stood in the middle of a tract of “cleared” bush, the stumps of the dead, generally burnt, trees giving a very pioneerish look to the country. Everything was deliciously green, and everywhere that bush had been left there were tree-ferns and cabbage-palms, and sometimes they adorned the gardens when every other foreign element had been carefully taken away.
Occasionally, on the sea-side of the line, there were views that reminded us of the coast near Dover, pasture-lands, with beautiful Jersey cattle, or flocks of snowy, newly shorn sheep, but the iron-roofed little houses, and the curious buildings of the milk-factories and creameries, the bustling, one-streeted towns and barn-like railway-stations, and especially a certain indefinable air of being en deshabille that the country wears, were all so far removed from everything English that any comparison was ridiculous. The people who crowded to the stations, as though the arrival of the Wellington mail-train was the signal for a gathering of the whole community, were all so well-dressed and prosperous-looking that there seemed to be only one class in the country, and that certainly not a labouring nor hard-working one!
At New Plymouth so great was the crowd assembled to see the train arrive that we had quite a difficulty in making our way through it. This train goes on from the town to the wharf with the mail for Auckland and the passengers going up by the boat that leaves for Onehunga at nine p.m., and between the Saturday night idlers and the friends of the people going northwards it was as bad as a bank-holiday crush. Luckily we had had the little baggage that was with us checked, and so did not have to wrestle with the populace round the baggage-van in the manner customary to the majority of travellers in this country, for very few people are even aware that it is possible to check one’s luggage; those who are seldom take the trouble, and the station people never advise or suggest it, so that the scene of confusion on the arrival of a train at a terminus is nearly as maddening as the waste of time and the impossibility of securing a porter until one’s patience is at the last ebb.
Our first experience of this sort at Rotorua had been quite enough, and we had speedily found out the existence of a Samaritan firm, the N.Z. Express Company, who had thereafter relieved us of all trouble excepting the few small things that never left our own custody. We had given them our itinerary and their vans now called for our baggage when we were leaving any place, and we saw it no more until we arrived at the next.
On Sunday morning we attended service in a dear little church of grey stone, covered with ivy, too, like a church at home, and like a military chapel inside, for there were hatchments hung round the walls, the colours of all the regiments that took part in the Maori war, with memorial brasses to those who fell in the Taranaki fights. The sexton who showed us round after service told
