A Range-top Climb.

Stony-floored creeks, fed by innumerable springs and streamlets in the hills, descend many hundreds of feet in three or four miles, and flow through the town gardens and orchards to the harbour. The central stream, the Wai-iti, enters the town in Balguerie Street, and comes dancing down to the tideway in close companionship with that beautiful old road of flowers and foliage. There is a road from the head of Balguerie Street to the summit of the central range at the Stony Bay saddle, more than two thousand feet above, and I know of no pleasanter way of making intimate acquaintance with the characteristic scenery of the Peninsula than by following up this winding sylvan trail to the hilltop, page 38 where you may look out on the open Pacific over the green eastern farm lands, slanting to the many bays. So gradual is the ascent, so winding the way among the farms and little copses of light bush, that it is an easy climb until the last rather steep pinch comes under the northernmost dark castellated crags of the peak that the early French naval visitors named Mont Berard.

The townspeople's orchard - buried homes give place to farmhouses as the road twists upwards, and in some of the fields, about this time, the cocksfoot-grass harvesters are busy. Here and there are tall old trees—totara or matai—relics of the great forest that once covered all the Peninsula, and thickets of small bush shade every gully. This is the greatest charm of the landscape here, the generous sprinkling of native vegetation on every range slope and in every valley. “Trees are the most civil society,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Akaroa folk have these children of the forest ever about them, the tonic bush smell in their nostrils, the forest-birds' song often in their ears.

The Peninsula people should be happy, free as they are from the nerve-racking noises and sordid sights of the towns, their lives cast in such pleasant flowery valleys by the running waters.

As we stroll up along the easy road, once crossing the small river at a shallow ford where a tree felled across the watercourse makes a level crossing for carts and sledges, we are tempted every now and again to take it easier still on the grassy and mossy banks under the leafy roof of kotukutuku and ngaio, and now and again a feathery kowhai or a kawakawa, the “pepper-tree.” The wawara-wai, as the Maori musically has it, the babble of the waters, makes soothing harmony under the low-spreading branches. There are the tracks of sledge runners on the narrowing road; that lonely farmhouse around the next bend, a dairy farm twelve hundred feet or more above the harbour level, sends its milk-cans down to the bay by the old-style bush koneke that is the only means of conveyance on some of these lofty roads.

Presently we are on the top of the range, and now we begin to understand something of the plan of this amazingly broken nest of ancient lava volcanoes. Wild crags and tors, castle-like bastions of drab grey rock, tomahawk-like faces of precipice, and tussock-clad slopes are on right and left.