210 A NEW ZEALAND NATURALIST'S CALENDAR. 



bush creek. The vegetation grew so thick and overarching 

 that one could barely get a glimpse of the sky. Trees and 

 shrubs, their steins and overhanging branches laden with 

 epiphytes, crowded down to meet each other over the 

 narrow bed of the streamlet. The walls of the gorge were 

 loaded with the dark green dripping fronds of the Loiiuiria. 

 The very stones in the rushing water were almost hidden 

 by their dense mantle of mosses and liverworts, creepers 

 and orchids, the quaint purple flowers of the latter re- 

 lieved by the delicate green of the Oxalis representative 

 and counterpart here of the pretty Wood-sorrel of the old 

 Homeland, and like it starred over with tender and fragile 

 white blossoms in the later Spring. Then in Autumn the 

 bright green Nerteras were covered with little scarlet 

 berries, looking so charming in the fugitive glimpses of 

 sunshine which penetrated these umbrageous retreats. It 

 was inevitable that as people crowded up the stream to see 

 the lowest of its five falls some of these things should 

 disappear ; but why did we allow the bush to be cleared 

 and the abominations of barbed-wire fences cut us off from 

 one of the finest beauty spots near town? 



I hope you will excuse these digressions as being not 

 without relevance and importance in such a desultory and 

 vagi-ant paper as this is. 



And now let us once more get back to the top of Flagstaff 

 Hill and have a seat on the very summit before resuming 

 our northward walk. We may with advantage descant on 

 the beauty of the landscape which, turn where we will, 

 spreads out before us in all directions. Away in front 

 stretches the boundless ocean, its northern aspects cut off 

 by Swampy Hill and Mount Cargill, bvit its coast-line far to 

 the south only limited by the Nuggets some 60 miles off. 

 Below us lies the Taieri Plain "tracts of pasture sunny 

 warm " mingled with fields of golden corn, the very Garden 

 of New Zealand, into which so many of the early settlers 

 looked and, dreading its deep swamps and lakes, and its 

 streams "gleaming silvery in the shallows, glooming darkly 

 in the pools," stopped short, and built their humble dwel- 

 lings on the cold hillsides. How many have since lamented 



