An Inspiring Panorama.

We were advised not to leave Russell without climbing the Trig station, Tikitikiora, where a grand panorama of the bay can be obtained. A winding road led us round the shore for about three and a half miles. Leaving the road at a point where red and white cottons tied to the scrub laid the trail, we commenced the ascent, ultimately emerging from the manuka on to a sun-bathed plateau thickly carpeted with the soft native grasses.

To stand in the midst of a beautiful picture with the fresh grass at one's feet, and the sweet mountain air around one, is a joy indeed. Here was a sky of blue softened with distant fleecy clouds, a sea of darker tone to match, dainty little treeclad islets merging into islands—undulating, green-sloped and cove-curved; bays and inlets and deeper inlets; the blue horizon to the northward, and the rolling hills to the south. Before we left, the

… the purl of a little valley fall About three spans wide and two spans tall.”—Thomas Hardy.
The Waitangi Falls as they flow over the curved rim into the estuary below.

son tints of the evening sun were shading the western clouds, and night, that follows apace in these northern lands, overtook us on the homeward track. But the wekas, calling across the valleys for the evening rendezvous, kept the taniwhas at bay.

The following morning we left Russell by mail launch for Kerikeri. The passengers included a small girl and a kitten— a knowing little grey tabby that liked not the look of the briny, and a Home lady who was going to her new place of residence, “away out back o’ beyond,” in one of the hidden recesses of the Bay of Islands. We wondered how she would appreiate the contrast from noisy Sheffield —her home town. She spoke of maids and many visitors, here she would have neither—water being the only means of access to her new home

On the slopes towards the entrance was pointed out to us the spot where Marsden preached his first sermon. A stately Norfolk pine stands as a living monument to his memory. Here, too, the first white woman was born. She lived to ninety-one, and lies in the old church cemetery in Russell.