ii 40 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



Moutere Hills, composed of irregular and imperfectly-stratified beds of shingle, gravel, 

 sand and clay, resting upon tertiary strata. The port of Nelson lies within the shel- 

 tering arm of a curious natural breakwater called the Boulder Bank. It consists of 

 rounded pebbles on boulders. At high-water a large portion of it is submerged, but at 

 low-water, a difference of fourteen feet, it is dry throughout its entire length. The 

 largest and heaviest boulders face the sea ; on the harbour side they become smaller, and 

 near the entrance they are so small " that vessels there can drive on the strand without 

 any damage, thus using the place as a natural dry-dock, in consequence of the great 

 difference of the water-level between ebb and flow." 



Completely environed inland by its hills, secluded too from the gales that frequently 

 whip the waters of the Strait into turbulent activity, with a sky of cloudless azure and 

 a balmy climate that seems like perennial summer, Dr. Johnson would have found in 

 Nelson the sober realization of the " Happy Valley" which he dreamed of for that creature 

 of his imagination, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. It is the "Sleepy Hollow" of New 

 Zealand, though its inhabitants are as active and enterprising as their fellows elsewhere ; 

 but as the province is mountainous, and chiefly adapted for pastoral purposes, they have 

 perforce lagged in the race of progress. Nelson remains the place for a quiet holiday, 

 for learned leisure, for spending a calm, uneventful existence, " husbanding out life's 

 taper to its close " amid scenes of idyllic beauty. 



A straggling cluster of houses has sprung up about the Port and its substantial 

 wooden wharf, but the town itself lies a little farther back and is approached by the 

 first tram-line constructed in New Zealand. It was the work, many years ago, of an 

 English company formed for utilizing the deposits of chrome-ore on the Dun Mountain, 

 a sterile-looking ridge of rusty-brown colour, which springs to an altitude of some four 

 thousand feet at a distance of a few miles south-east of the town. The tram-way has 

 outlived the Company, and now does a good passenger traffic. The town itself is pretty 

 and picturesque. A small stream called the Matai meanders through it along willow- 

 fringed banks, and the dwellings of the people, lying not far distant from the leading 

 business thoroughfares, are gay with pleasant gardens. The heart of the town beats in 

 Trafalgar Square, but it beats very placidly, and is rarely troubled with any serious 

 excitement. It has its Theatre Royal, its Masonic Hall, its Provincial Hall, its two 

 daily papers, and water-works, gas-works, a literary museum, hotels, banks and the other 

 adjuncts of civilized life, as well as churches (one of them the Cathedral), schools, a 

 Roman Catholic orphanage, a public hospital and a lunatic asylum. Its Boys' and Girls' 

 High Schools won for themselves so high a repute that pupils resort to them for their 

 education from all parts of New Zealand. 



The leading industries of Nelson comprise leather, soap and jam factories and 

 breweries, but the distinctive industry of the place is suggested by the prevalence of 

 hop-gardens. Nelson hops are famed throughout the colony, as well as beyond it, and 

 it requires no prescience to divine that this district is destined to be the Kent of the 

 Britain of the South. But the province is far richer in natural wealth than the English 

 county. It has been pronounced by good authority to be " the veritable home of 

 minerals." Coal, copper, oil-shales, zinc, marble, granite and haematite have all been 

 discovered in large quantities ; of haematite ore, the quantity exposed at the Parapara 



