300 SIGHT-SEEING IN NEW ZEALAND. 



mostly extinct, but many still smoking, are found all over the 

 North Island, while basaltic and other igneous rocks are found as 

 abundantly in the South Island. Enormous quantities and 

 depths of diluvium are overlying the whole country, hills, ridges, 

 and even mountains, in positions where it is impossible to account 

 for them except as having been deposited on the sea bottom and 

 then recently elevated. In cuts through the hills, at various ele- 

 vations inland, I often saw layers of marine shells, sometimes a 

 foot thick, clear and clean as they had been laid up on the sea 

 shore. In fact the evidence is so plain that even the natives have 

 thought it necessary to account for it. So they will gravely tell 

 you that once on a time their great god Maui went fishing in the 

 waters that were then overlying the North Island. He had a 

 hook made out of the jaw bone of one of his ancestors. After 

 varying luck, he at last caught his hook under a rock, and in try- 

 ing to pull it out, he lifted the bottom of the ocean right up into 

 the hills and mountains of New Zealand. 



It seems to me that I would interest you more in this lovely 

 tourists' land, if I told you of my travels, and what I saw and 

 thought of the people and scenes. It will necessarily bring in a 

 good many capital " Fs ". But you will in reality, I imagine, 

 find me but a small factor in the incidents and descriptions that 

 I will be able to give you so much better in this way. I will 

 therefore run along through my diary, catching at what I think 

 will interest you most. 



One bright summer morning in January, after a three weeks 

 steamer voyage, I landed in Auckland, a lovely English built city 

 of 30,000 inhabitants, as far in the southern hemisphere as Rich- 

 mond, Virginia, is in the northern. With a company of our 

 passengers I started off at once up Queen Street for the Prince 

 Albert Hotel, to get our first breakfast on shore. But what a 

 disappointment, when we came to see the little cramped and 

 insignificant hotel ! Why, there is not in any of the large cities 

 of the southern colonies, a hotel that begins to equal those which 

 we rank as second class. Our breakfast consisted of splendid 

 meats, the best you can imagine, with bread and coffee. That 

 was all. You get magnificent cuts of beef and mutton where 



