Nelson's Place Names.

The names Nelson and Trafalgar and many another name of town and surroundings give a strong patriotic colour to the place. It is distinctly a Royal Navy town in its nomenclature, a perpetual reminder of England's glorious history on the sea. So we find streets named Nile, St. Vincent, Victory, Vanguard, Collingwood and Hardy. In an account of the selection of local names by a committee of settlers in 1842 we find Fort Bastia, Fort Calvi, Aboukir Battery and The Heights of Agamemnon. The last was perhaps rather too much of a mouthful, for it does not seem to have been retained. England's great writers are remembered; there are Shakespeare Walk and Milton Grove.

A few miles up the valley, where the native bush is entered there are lovely nooks for the artist. A walk rewarding one with a fine panorama of blue sea, white town, green fields and encircling ranges is a climb to Britannia Heights, a public reserve between the town and the port. There is a very pretty little park, with shady walks and a serpentine lakelet.

A church should always if possible be set on a hill, and Nelson has a splendid site of that kind for its new cathedral, which replaces an old wooden building, on a noble page 22 mound which fills in the view as one looks up the principal thoroughfare, Trafalgar Street.

Nelson has a marked atmosphere of culture and scientific learning. Its fine colleges, its School of Music and its Art Gallery are old institutions; more recent the Cawthron Institute of Scientific Research, a richly endowed home of skilled technical investigations into problems which particularly affect New Zealand's varied productions from the soil.

There is gold in some of the mountains of Nelson; there is wealth in silver, copper iron ore, and coal; there is wealth in its great forests of the back country. But most of all is the province rich in soil. Pre-eminently this is the land of orchards. There is a driving circuit of some thirty miles over the Waimea Plain which takes one through the most attractive and fruitful country.