A writer who has lately done much scrambling about the Southern Alps describes Mt. Tasman as “New Zealand's finest mountain.” Such an opinion is clearly open to contradiction. Tasman's shape undoubtedly is beautiful, but Aorangi is more commanding, besides being a trifle loftier; and Tasman is closely neighboured by many other peaks, all of which attract the eye. Probably the grandest sight in the Alps, apart from the great glaciers, is the vast rugged wall of Aorangi as seen from the Hooker Valley.

But for sheer beauty of outline and all the landscape qualities one could wish to see in a perfect mountain, the present writer turns to Taranaki.

Mount Egmont is really a peerless peak. It is not dwarfed by other mountains, it does not lose in effect by rising from an alpine chain with a hundred other peaks. Swelling up in shapely dignity from the plains and the seafront belt of land, and belted about with rich forests, like a garment, it climbs in the delicious sweeping curves that only volcanic cones show, to an altitude only three thousand feet less than Tasman's. There is not a peak in the South Island that can compare in these qualities of satisfying symmetry with our ancient fire-mountains of the North. Taranaki must remain the perfect type of the high places of the earth—at any rate our sector of it.