When all is said, however, it is not the cities which interest most the ordinary visitors to New Zealand. They may have a charm which it is no exaggeration to call loveliness, as Auckland has; or be finely seated on hill-sides overlooking noble harbours, as Wellington and Dunedin are. They may have sweetly redeeming features, like the river banks, public and private gardens, and the vistas of hills and distant mountains seen in flat Christchurch. They may be pleasant altogether both in themselves and their landscape, as Nelson is. But after all they are towns, and modern towns, whose best qualities are that they are wholesome and that their raw newness is passing away. It is to the country and the country life that travellers naturally turn for escape into something with a spice of novelty and maybe a touch of romance. Nor need they be disappointed. Country life in the islands varies with the locality and the year. It is not always bright, any more than is the New Zealand sky. It is not always prosperous, any more [29]than you can claim that the seasons are always favourable. But, on the whole, I do not hesitate to say, that to a healthy capable farmer or rural worker the colony offers the most inviting life in the world. In the first place, the life is cheerful and healthy; in the next place, the work, though laborious at times, need not be killing; and then the solitude, that deadly accompaniment of early colonial life, has now ceased to be continuous except in a few scattered outposts. Moreover—and this is important—there is money in it. The incompetent or inexperienced farmer may, of course, lose his capital, just as a drunken or stupid labourer may fail to save out of his wages. But year in, year out, the farmer who knows his business and sticks to it can and does make money, improve his property, and see his position grow safer and his anxieties less. Good farmers can make profits quite apart from the very considerable increment which comes to the value of land as population spreads. Whatever may be said of this rise in price as a matter of public policy, it fills the pockets of individuals in a manner highly satisfactory to many of the present generation.  
NELSON
One of the most cheerful features in New Zealand country life, perhaps, is the extent to which those who own the land are taking root in the soil. Far the greater part of the settled country is in the hands of men and families who live on the land, and may go on living there as long as they please; no one can oust them. They are either freeholders, or tenants of the State or public bodies. Such tenants hold their lands [30]on terms so easy that their position as working farmers is as good as or better than that of freeholders. As prospective sellers of land they may not be so well placed; but that is another story. Anyway, rural New Zealand is becoming filled with capable independent farmers, with farms of all sizes from the estate of four thousand or five thousand acres to the peasant holding of fifty or one hundred. Colonists still think in large areas when they define the degrees of land-holding and ownership.
 
ON THE BEACH AT NGUNGURU
And here a New Zealander, endeavouring to make a general sketch that may place realities clearly before the English eye, is confronted with the difficulty, almost impossibility, of helping the European to conceive a thinly peopled territory. Suppose, for a moment, what the British Islands would be like if they were populated on the New Zealand scale—that is to say, if they held about a million souls, of whom fifty thousand were brown and the rest white. The brown would be English-speaking and half civilised, and the whites just workaday Britons of the middle and labouring classes, better fed, a little taller and rather more tanned by sun and wind. That at first sight does not seem to imply any revolutionary change. But imagine yourself standing on the deck of a steamer running up the English Channel past the coast as it would look if nineteen-twentieths of the British population, and all traces of them and the historic past of their country, had been swept away. The cliff edges of Cornwall and hills of Devon would be covered with thick forest, and perhaps a few people [31]might cluster round single piers in sheltered inlets like Falmouth and Plymouth. The Chalk Downs of Wiltshire and Hampshire would be held by a score or two of sheep-farmers, tenants of the Crown, running their flocks over enormous areas of scanty grass. Fertile strips like the vale of Blackmore would be occupied by independent farmers with from three hundred to two thousand acres of grass and crops round their homesteads. Southampton would be the largest town in the British Islands, a flourishing and busy seaport, containing with its suburbs not less than 90,000 people. Its inhabitants would proudly point to the railway system, of which they were the terminus, and by which they were connected with Liverpool, the second city of the United Kingdom, holding with Birkenhead about 70,000 souls. Journeying from Southampton to Liverpool on a single line of rails, the traveller would note a comfortable race of small farmers established in the valley of the Thames, and would hear of similar conditions about the Wye and the Severn. But he would be struck by the almost empty look of the wide pastoral stretches in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and would find axemen struggling with Nature in the forest of Arden, where dense thickets would still cover the whole of Warwickshire and spread over into the neighbouring counties. Arrived at Liverpool after a twelve hours’ journey, he might wish to visit Dublin or Glasgow, the only two other considerable towns in the British Islands; the one about as large as York now is, the other the size of Northampton. He would be informed by the [32]Government tourist agent in Liverpool that his easiest way to Glasgow would be by sea to a landing-place in the Solway Firth, where he would find the southern terminus of the Scotch railways. He would discover that England and Scotland were not yet linked by rail, though that great step in progress was confidently looked for within a few months.
 
AT THE FOOT OF LAKE TE-ANAU
By all this I do not mean to suggest that there are no spots in New Zealand where the modern side of rural English life is already closely reproduced. On an earlier page I have said that there are. Our country life differs widely as you pass from district to district, and is marked by as much variety as is almost everything else in the islands. On the east coast of the South Island, between Southland and the Kaikouras, mixed farming is scientifically carried on with no small expenditure of skill and capital. The same can be said of certain districts on the west coast of the Wellington Province, and in the province of Hawkes Bay, within a moderate distance of the town of Napier. Elsewhere, with certain exceptions, farming is of a rougher and more primitive-looking sort than anything seen in the mother country, though it does not follow that a comparatively rough, unkempt appearance denotes lack of skill or agricultural knowledge. It may mean, and usually does mean, that the land is in the earlier stages of settlement, and that the holders have not yet had time to think much of appearances. Then outside the class of small or middle-sized farms come the large holdings of the islands, which are like nothing at all in the [33]United Kingdom. They are of two kinds, freehold and Crown lands held under pastoral licences. Generally speaking, the freeholds are much the more valuable, have much more arable land, and will, in days to come, carry many more people. The pastoral Crown tenants have, by the pressure of land laws and the demands of settlement, been more and more restricted to the wilder and more barren areas of the islands. They still hold more than ten million acres; but this country chiefly lies in the mountainous interior, covering steep faces where the plough will never go, and narrow terraces and cold, stony valleys where the snow lies deep in winter.
On these sheep stations life changes more slowly than elsewhere. If you wish to form an idea of what pastoral life “up-country” was forty years ago, you can still do so by spending a month or two at one of these mountain homesteads. There you may possibly have the owner and the owner’s family for society, but are rather more likely to be yourself furnishing a solitary manager with not unwelcome company. Round about the homestead you will still see the traditional features of colonial station life, the long wool-shed with high-pitched roof of shingles or corrugated iron, and the sheep-yards which, to the eye of the new chum, seem such an unmeaning labyrinth. Not far off will stand the men’s huts, a little larger than of yore, and more likely nowadays to be frame cottages than to be slab whares with the sleeping-bunks and low, wide chimneys of days gone by. In out-of-the-way spots the station [34]store may still occasionally be found, with its atmosphere made odorous by hob-nailed boots, moleskin trousers, brown sugar, flannel shirts, tea, tar, and black tobacco. For the Truck Act does not apply to sheep stations, and there are still places far enough away from a township to make the station store a convenience to the men.
 
THE WAIKATO AT NGARUAWAHIA
At such places the homestead is still probably nothing more than a modest cottage, roomy, but built of wood, and owing any attractiveness it has to its broad verandah, perhaps festooned with creepers, and to the garden and orchard which are now seldom absent. In the last generation the harder and coarser specimens of the pioneers often affected to hold gardens and garden-stuffs cheap, and to despise planting and adornment of any kind, summing them up as “fancy work.” This was not always mere stinginess or brute indifference to everything that did not directly pay, though it sometimes was. There can be no doubt that absentee owners or mortgagee companies were often mean enough in these things. But the spirit that grudged every hour of labour bestowed on anything except the raising of wool, mutton, or corn, was often the outcome of nothing worse than absorption in a ceaseless and unsparing battle with Nature and the fluctuations of markets. The first generation of settlers had to wrestle hard to keep their foothold; and, naturally, the men who usually survived through bad times were those who concentrated themselves most intensely on the struggle for success and existence. But time mellows everything. [35]The struggle for life has still to be sustained in New Zealand. It is easier than of yore, however; and the continued prosperity of the last twelve or thirteen years has enabled settlers to bestow thought and money on the lighter and pleasanter side. Homesteads are brighter places than they were: they may not be artistic, but even the most remote are nearly always comfortable. More than comfort the working settler does not ask for.
Then in estimating how far New Zealand country life may be enjoyable and satisfying we must remember that it is mainly a life out of doors. On farms and stations of all sorts and sizes the men spend many hours daily in the open, sometimes near the homestead, sometimes miles away from it. To them, therefore, climate is of more importance than room-space, and sunshine than furniture. If we except a handful of mountaineers, the country worker in New Zealand is either never snowbound at all, or, at the worst, is hampered by a snowstorm once a year. Many showery days there are, and now and again the bursts of wind and rain are wild enough to force ploughmen to quit work, or shepherds to seek cover; but apart from a few tempests there is nothing to keep country-folk indoors. It is never either too hot or too cold for out-door work, while for at least one day in three in an average year it is a positive pleasure to breathe the air and live under the pleasant skies.
The contrast between the station of the back-ranges and the country place of the wealthy freeholder is the [36]contrast between the first generation of colonial life and the third. The lord of 40,000 acres may be a rural settler or a rich man with interests in town as well as country. In either case his house is something far more costly than the old wooden bungalow. It is defended by plantations and approached by a curving carriage drive. When the proprietor arrives at his front door he is as likely to step out of a motor-car as to dismount from horseback. Within, you may find an airy billiard-room; without, smooth-shaven tennis lawns, and perhaps a bowling-green. The family and their guests wear evening dress at dinner, where the wine will be expensive and may even be good. In the smoking-room, cigars have displaced the briar-root pipes of our fathers. The stables are higher and more spacious than were the dwellings of the men of the early days. Neat grooms and trained gardeners are seen in the place of the “rouse-abouts” of yore. Dip and wool-shed are discreetly hidden from view; and a conservatory rises where meat once hung on the gallows.
For a colony whose days are not threescore years and ten, ours has made some creditable headway in gardening. The good and bad points of our climate alike encourage us to cultivate the art. The combination of an ample rainfall with lavish sunshine helps the gardener’s skill. On the other hand, the winds—those gales from north-west and south-west, varied by the teasing persistency of the steadier north-easter, plague of spring afternoons—make the planting of hedgerows [37]and shelter clumps an inevitable self-defence. So while, on the one hand, the colonist hews and burns and drains away the natural vegetation of forest and swamp, on the other, in the character of planter and gardener, he does something to make amends. The colours of England and New Zealand glow side by side in the flowers round his grass plots, while Australia and North America furnish sombre break-winds, and contribute some oddities of foliage and a share of colour. In seaside gardens the Norfolk Island pine takes the place held by the cedar of Lebanon on English lawns. The mimosa and jackarandah of Australia persist in flowering in the frosty days of our early spring. On the verandahs, jessamine and Virginia creeper intertwine with the clematis and passion-flower of the bush. The palm-lily—insulted with the nickname of cabbage-tree—is hardy enough to flourish anywhere despite its semi-tropical look; but the nikau, our true palm, requires shelter from bitter or violent winds. The toé-toé (a reed with golden plumes), the glossy native flax (a lily with leaves like the blade of a classic Roman sword), and two shrubs, the matipo and karaka, are less timid, so more serviceable. The crimson parrot’s-beak and veronicas—white, pink, and purple—are easily and commonly grown; and though the manuka does not rival the English whitethorn in popularity, the pohutu-kawa, most striking of flowering trees, surpasses the ruddy may and pink chestnut of the old country. Some English garden-charms cannot be transplanted. The thick sward and living green of soft [38]lawns, the moss and mellowing lichens that steal slowly over bark and walls, the quaintness that belongs to old-fashioned landscape gardening, the venerable aspect of aged trees,—these cannot be looked for in gardens the eldest of which scarcely count half a century. But a climate in which arum lilies run wild in the hedgerows, and in which bougainvilleas, camellias, azaleas, oleanders, and even (in the north) the stephanotis, bloom in the open air, gives to skill great opportunities. Then the lover of ferns—and they have many lovers in New Zealand—has there a whole realm to call his own. Not that every fern will grow in every garden. Among distinct varieties numbering scores, there are many that naturally cling to the peace and moisture of deep gullies and overshadowing jungle. There, indeed, is found a wealth of them—ferns with trunks as thick as trees, and ferns with fronds as fine as hair or as delicate as lace; and there are filmy ferns, and such as cling to and twine round their greater brethren, and pendant ferns that droop from crevices and drape the faces of cliffs. To these add ferns that climb aloft as parasites on branches and among foliage, or that creep upon the ground, after the manner of lycopodium, or coat fallen forest trees like mosses. The tree-ferns are large enough to be hewn down with axes, and to spread their fronds as wide as the state umbrellas of Asiatic kings. Thirty feet is no uncommon span for the shade they cast, and their height has been known to reach fifty feet. They are to other ferns as the wandering albatross is to lesser sea-birds. The black-trunked[39] are the tallest, while the silver-fronded, whose wings seem as though frosted on the underside, are the most beautiful. In places they stand together in dense groves. Attempt to penetrate these and you find a dusky entanglement where your feet sink into tinder and dead, brown litter. But look down upon a grove from above, and your eyes view a canopy of green intricacies, a waving covering of soft, wing-like fronds, and fresh, curving plumes.
 
TREE FERNS
The change in country life now going on so rapidly has not meant merely more comfort for the employer: the position of the men also has altered for the better. While the land-owner’s house and surroundings show a measure of refinement, and even something that may at the other end of the earth pass for luxury, the station hands are far better cared for than was the case a generation or two ago. The interior of the “men’s huts” no longer reminds you of the foc’sle of a merchantship. Seek out the men’s quarters on one of the better managed estates, and it may easily happen that you will now find a substantial, well-built cottage with a broad verandah round two sides. Inside you are shown a commodious dining-room, and a reading-room supplied............