Geysers and Gazers.

The guides who dispense information to visitors at some of our tourist resorts, more particularly those in the Rotorua country, must send some visitors away with a curious mass of data about the sights they see. The youthful, or not so youthful Maori, half-caste, or pakeha guide, does the best that is in her—it is usually her. None of them is ever at a loss. They know exactly how many million gallons flow from a certain spring in the twenty-four hours; no one at any rate is likely to go to the trouble of measuring it and contradicting them.

A good many years ago, I watched an earnest party of young women school teachers from Australia standing, with notebooks out, near the Wairoa geyser at Whakarewarewa, with a girl guide of the village. Up went the geyser, higher and higher, while the girls scattered with squeals of fright and delight.

“How high did it go?” they asked with one accord, when it was all over.

“Seven hundred feet,” said the guide firmly. And down went the seven hundred feet in half-a-dozen notebooks, no doubt to be embodied in due course in a school lesson or a college thesis on the marvels of New Zealand's geyserland. No use any mere Maorilander contradicting that estimate. It was down in the notebooks.