A writer who has lately done much scrambling about the Southern Alps describes Mt. Tasman as “New Zealand's finest mountain.” Such an opinion is clearly open to contradiction. Tasman's shape undoubtedly is beautiful, but Aorangi is more commanding, besides being a trifle loftier; and Tasman is closely neighboured by many other peaks, all of which attract the eye. Probably the grandest sight in the Alps, apart from the great glaciers, is the vast rugged wall of Aorangi as seen from the Hooker Valley.

But for sheer beauty of outline and all the landscape qualities one could wish to see in a perfect mountain, the present writer turns to Taranaki.

Mount Egmont is really a peerless peak. It is not dwarfed by other mountains, it does not lose in effect by rising from an alpine chain with a hundred other peaks. Swelling up in shapely dignity from the plains and the seafront belt of land, and belted about with rich forests, like a garment, it climbs in the delicious sweeping curves that only volcanic cones show, to an altitude only three thousand feet less than Tasman's. There is not a peak in the South Island that can compare in these qualities of satisfying symmetry with our ancient fire-mountains of the North. Taranaki must remain the perfect type of the high places of the earth—at any rate our sector of it.

One of the “Charlotte Janes.”

There are not many old folk surviving to tell of the memorable voyage they made to New Zealand in the pioneer ship of the Canterbury settlers, the little “Charlotte Jane,” eighty years ago. One of the proud band of pioneers lives in Nelson, Mrs. Helen Anderson, who celebrated her ninety-second birthday lately. Her father helped to make history in infant Christchurch, for he was the printer for Mr. J. E. Fitzgerald, who founded the “Lyttelton Times,” now the “Christchurch Times.” As she was a girl of twelve on the voyage, Mrs. Anderson, no doubt, can recall the singing of the celebrated ditty of the deep, the “Night Watch Song of the Charlotte Jane,” written by Mr. Fitzgerald. The song begins: “’Tis the first watch of the night, brothers, And the strong wind rides the deep.”

The musical score has been preserved, and the chant of the pioneers deserves to be kept well in memory, as an anthem of nation-making expressing the high hopes and the spirit of strong endeavour and comradeship that distinguished above most bodies of immigrants that ship's company of the adventurous barkey with the homely old name.

All Clear for the Slasher.

A flaxcutter died in the Manawatu district the other day from a terrible gash in the back of his neck made by his slash-hook while cutting page 42 for a mill. Apparently a blackberry branch caught and deflected the slasher when the poor fellow raised it to cut at a flax bush, hence the fatal injury. It is quite feasible. It is perfectly easy to suffer a serious accident when using a slash-hook or axe amongst tangled vegetation. A slash-hook such as bushmen and hedge-trimmers use is an implement to be used with care, especially if you are raising it above you. One can recall instances of injury suffered through entanglement in a supplejack vine when cutting a bush track.

A Gala Day on a Beautiful Southern Lake.
The Railway Department's lake steamer “Earnslaw” conveying over 600 Invercargill excursionists to the head of Lake Wakatipu, South Island, New Zealand.

And even the domestic axe is capable of inflicting a nasty cut. Don't, if you value your neck or your home reputation for good temper, don't chop the household firewood anywhere near a clothes-line. All the chances are that you will deliver a mighty sweeping blow that will just catch that line, and if nothing worse happens your nerves will be frayed more than a trifle.

Barlow's Night Ride.

A little story about Otorohanga, on the North Island Main Trunk line, the tale of the most daring piece of work in the history of tracking down criminals in New Zealand. There was a Maori named Winiata who in the late 'seventies tomahawked a fell-worker named Packer, on a farm at Epsom, near Auckland, over a dispute about money which the pakeha owed him. Winiata fled to the King Country, skilfully evading the Waikato police, and for several years he lived a free life in the Maori territory, where no policeman was allowed in those days. The Queen's writ did not run there till after 1883. The police, however, did not forget the wanted man; there was a standing Government reward of £500 for his arrest. He did not venture into their frontier townships.

A big half-caste named Robert Barlow, a powerful, fearless fellow, went to Police Inspector McGovern, of Hamilton, one day, and offered to try his hand at bringing in Winiata from the Ngata-Maniapoto country. McGovern and Sergeant Gillies, of Te Awamutu (afterwards Inspector in Christchurch) fixed up a scheme with Barlow, and off the big frontiersman rode to carry it out. His plan was bold and exceedingly risky. Winiata was known to carry a loaded revolver always, and he was surrounded by friends and sympathisers. Barlow did not hurry matters. He rode leisurely from one settlement to another, with his wife; the pair led a spare horse. The man-hunter professed to be a pig-buyer, having heard that Winiata trafficked in the poaka. They met in a house at page 43 Otorohanga, and discussed pigs and politics.

As the night went on Barlow produced a bottle of rum—which had been well “doped” by a chemist in a frontier town. Winiata, at first suspicious, fell into the waipiro trap, and presently was oblivious to pigs and everything else. The other people in the house were asleep, and Barlow and his wife contrived to get their man outside, after removing a revolver which he wore under his shirt. (Barlow, too, had a revolver in his clothes.) They dumped him on the led horse, and tied him fast; then they rode off through the midnight hours—always expecting to be chased—along through the fern and swamps, forded the Puniu River, and reached Kihikihi, the first township across the border, a little before daylight, after a ride of about sixteen miles.

Winiata by this time was wide awake to his plight, and there was a desperate struggle on the road in front of Corboy's publichouse. The Armed Constabulary, in the redoubt nearby, were aroused, Winiata was overpowered and chained to an iron bedstead in the barrack-room. A few weeks later he was hanged in Mt. Eden gaol, and Barlow collected his £500 reward, with which he bought a farm at Mangere, near Auckland.

Mokau Memories.

Where the Main Trunk line crosses the Mokau River, about midway between Te Kuiti and the Poro-o-Tarao, that stream is an insignificant one, narrow and winding slowly between fern banks from its birthplace near the Rangitoto Ranges. Lower down it becomes a navigable river, for canoes and motor launches at any rate. It was a famous waterway in olden days.

It was the only road into the interior in that part of the country, so rugged and forest-covered. The early missionaries used it; there was a station of the Lutheran Church people away up at Motu-karamu, near Totoro, nearly ninety years ago. Percy Smith and Wilson Hursthouse, the pioneer surveyors, came up this way from Taranaki seventy-two years ago—then adventurous youths; they crossed the present route of the Main Trunk somewhere near Mangapeehi station on their way to Lake Taupo. Little did Hursthouse foresee in those rough times that he would be one of the planners of the railway through this heart of the King Country.

Even at this time of day the beauties of the Mokau are little known, because of the snags and rapids which impede navigation above the old coal mines. There is a place where the present writer once camped, on a canoeing expedition, on a little island between rapids, at the Panirau bend, where the forest-clad ranges, almost as steep as a wall, make a magnificent canyon. The ranges here run up to a thousand feet and more above the river.

One of the Chief Sources of New Zealand's Wealth.
Southdowns at Mr. Dysart's farm, Marlborough Province, South Island.