A DRY NEW ZEALAND SUMMER. 
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parched ground and fading like shade, or if heavier making the 
thirsty land smell for an hour like a hothouse watered at noon. 
Even heavy showers, however, are immediately absorbed, and 
as the drought is prolonged, coils of smoke arise on all sides, and 
every hill seems a little volcano, dense chocolate-brown from the 
felled forest, black and harsh from the manuka, and cowslip- 
coloured from the fern. 
First in order come the hres of winter, fallen forest lands, 
and those who have risked the possibility of rain, and delayed 
putting in a match, get in such a dry season wonderful clean 
burns, boughs, branches, and even the smaller trunks being 
quite consumed, and their former position marked only by lines 
of thick grey ash. The very largest boles smoulder on for 
weeks, the fires gouging and chiseling their mass like burrowing 
grubs in a rotten stump. Dead trees are always untouched in a 
felling contract ; and the hollow, funnel-like trunks of the para- 
sitical rata, where the wild bees have swarmed for years, are 
alight for months, roaring in the dry gales, sending up faint blue 
smoke columns in calm, and smouldering all but extinct in rains. 
When the lumber has been thoroughly dried, it is wonderful with 
what celerity hundreds of acres of fallen bush are consumed. 
The match dropped blackens a shrivelling leaf or two, and 
for a few moments the flame feeds silently on the brown, rolled, 
heat-curled leaves. Then a little circle forms, the edges aflame 
with tongues that flicker and reach ; then a first hurrying gust 
drops down and flattens the flames, and rolls them backwards 
and forwards, fiercely rocking and fanning the tiny fire, and at 
times seeming almost to extinguish it. 
Smoke begins to rise ; the flames begin to create a draught ; 
the fire bites deeper into one blackened edge ; the circle is lost 
in an obtuse cone, that again narrows into a fiery wedge, that 
rushes and leaps before the rising wind, and singes the higher 
branches and sweeps along in a long, steady roar, preceded by 
pungent smoke, and incandescent leaves and showers of fiery 
sparks. Then, in a roar — like the roar of the sea — and a crackle 
like musketry, the flames disappear in the low-driven smoke, 
one breath of which clutches the throat, and causes the foot to be 
stamped in choking pain. Through the dun atmosphere the 
high blaze of the standing trees is indistinct, and hardly 
brightens the smoke gloom, and in a few moments the fire has 
rolled on, and the open ground is cumbered only with charred 
logs that redden to fire in the breeze and whiten to smoke in 
the lull. 
Very characteristic of the New Zealand bush are the huge 
trees that, dead and bare, top the younger forest growths. 
These, too, even in the green unfallen bush, are lit by the 
sparks that fly for hundreds of yards, so that here and there in 
the standing forest also rise columns of smoke. These fires are 
very destructive to animal life, and after a fire of three or four 
hundred acres of bush, scores of pigeons, wekas, fantails, and 
