DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH OF NEW ZEALAND. 



"49 



by, until he finds himself within the suburbs of an important industrial, commercial 

 and social centre, and inside the precincts of "The City of the Plains." 



CHRISTCHURCH. 



Two features at once arrest the attention of the travelled visitor. The first is the 

 thoroughly English look of the place. In the outskirts are chimps of exotic trees, 

 pleasant hedge-rows, charming country lanes, neat cottages with plots of garden, and 

 cultivated farms ; within the city limits which, by the way, are belted with trees 

 churches and schools that look just as if they had been lifted bodily out of some 

 English town and quietly dropped down here along with their Old World surroundings. 

 Nothing is here to suggest pronounced colonial peculiarities. The other striking feature 

 is the symmetry of the plan of the city, and this fact at once reminds us that Christ- 

 church is the creation of a single generation that it is essentially modern ; and that if 

 we succeed in tracing many English resemblances, we fail at the same time to note any 

 servile imitations. The city is rather more than a mile square, and the" streets, with 



one exception, have been laid out, with geomet- 

 rical precision, in straight lines. The large open 

 space known as the Cathedral Square lies in 

 the very heart of the city, and one street which 

 pursues an even diagonal course right through 

 and beyond it, namely High Street, is the only 

 departure from the all-pervading look of square- 

 ness. It also increases the stranger's chance 

 of loosing his way among this net-work of 

 wonderfully similar thoroughfares. The portrait 

 which we have thus roughly outlined still lacks 

 one or two touches to render it recognizable. 



THE CATHEDRAL SQUARE, CHRISTCHURCH. 



It would be unpardonable to forget the River Avon in a description of Christchurch. 

 It is a comparatively shallow stream of pellucid water, which meanders in tranquil smooth- 

 ness through the city between low banks fringed with weeping willows, and under bridges 



