“The Romance of the Rail”

Mr. James Cowan has distinguished himself as a devotee of Nature and wild life. Now he comes forward as historian and protagonist of the railway, for he has written the story for the the “Romance of the Rail,” booklet No. 2, just issued by the Publicity Branch of the New Zealand Railways (says the “Dunedin Star”). It is described as an illustrated narrative of the railway express journey from Lyttelton to the Bluff. It might be thought that this is an uninteresting subject, since its scope does not extend to Nelson or the West Coast or the Alps, where our best scenery is; but Mr. Cowan has an eye for the beautiful and the romantic, and the gift of showing his readers all the charm that lies in the supposedly drear precincts of the railway. Thus the booklet becomes not an advertisement for the railway, but a charming collection of vignettes of our South Island cities, interspersed with fragments of Maori legend and white history, and all kinds of anecdotes.

The booklet is illustrated to do justice to the text. The cover design is a lovely bit of colour work, and the photography traverses Lyttelton, Christchurch, Rakaia, Ashburton, the farming lands, seaside Timaru, Oamaru, Port Chalmers and Dunedin, with glimpses of the Gore and Invercargill stations. To overseas readers this work would be specially attractive.