The Southern Lakes.

Dunedin, with its grace of architecture, its plenty of green groves and softly wooded hills that belt it, will be for the Duke a pleasant place. So, too, will be the great plains and downs he will traverse on his way to the Lakes. It is likely that he will have a speedy drive out from Invercargill to Lake Manapouri or Lake Te Anau. The former is preferable, for a quick motor journey. With its many green isles, its water of magic blue and silver, its glory of alp and forest, it is the loveliest lake in all New Zealand.

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Wakatipu will be visited, and our Royal guest, it is tolerably certain, will never forget the barbaric glory of the South Arm through which his steamer will pass on the way from the railhead at Kingston to the pretty waterside town of Queenstown.

This South Arm is remarkable for its narrowness, the profound blue of its depths, the exceedingly precipitous, lofty and broken character of its mountain walls. Above Kingston, on the left, are the craggy peaks of the Eyre Mountains, rising to nearly 7,000 feet, snow-sprinkled and cloud-wreathed; and on the right are the heights of the Hector Mountains, poetically called by the Maoris Tapuae'nuku, “The Footsteps of Uenuku,—the Rainbow God—because they were so often seen spanned by rainbows. The steamer's course is steered within a short distance of the jutting rocks. Shrubberies climb a little way up the steeply slanting mountains, which soon stand out bold, intractable and bare, shooting skywards into savage blades and rugged turrets, and seamed with many a deep couloir, the race-track of the avalanches. The Bay Peaks, sheer precipices of nearly 5,500 feet, are passed on the left, and now even wilder and more grimly fantastic mountain summits rise on each side of the narrow waterway, gorgeously tinted with glowing colours which are reflected in the mirror of the lake. The sunrise and sunset effects on these mountains are to many the greatest charm of Wakatipu scenery. On the left are the Bayonet Peaks, rising into spiked pinnacles of desolate rock, four thousand feet above us. Next comes Mount Cecil, heaving forth its buttress into the purple depths, and now the lake bends sharply to the west. As we draw away from the eastern shore we open out above the cliffs the grandest mountain picture of all—the whole front of the Remarkables, a long, serrated range of shark's tooth peaks, carved sharply against the sky, rising near their northern end into the Double Cone, twin crags of knife-like rock. The whole face of the range is a vast jumble of sharp ridges and deeply-cut couloirs, down which the broken bones of the mountains are ever crumbling to the valleys.