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In Picnic Bay.

What mingled pleasure and regret there is in the thought of old Hauraki days! In one craft and another, but most of all in a certain little half-decker, we sailed from bay to bay, making a new anchorage every night. We poked into all sorts of coves and creeks along that most enchanting sector of the Auckland coast; we cooked our meals on an old nail-can, which made the best possible stove; we found every day a new adventure.

One Christmas Day it happened that our rendezvous was Coromandel. We made up a party that day, with some friends from the shore, and what a party it was, and how we pitied the folk in the towns that day of perfect delight! We sailed across the harbour to that enchanting spot, the “Little Passage,” where the long woody point of the northern shore comes out to meet Beeson's Island. Mainland and island almost touch noses there is a narrow seaway between rimmed by the cleanest and whitest of sandy beaches. What a Christmas dinner it was! There was schnapper fresh caught from the little passage; we boiled it in salt water with the potatoes; there were lots of good things from the shore, including a glorious duff; and there were oysters from the rocks—the most delicious oysters I had ever tasted, and we had sampled them from every island in the Gulf in those happy days before absurd poaching regulations were invented along the Hauraki.

We picnicked under a grand old spreading pohutukawa tree, aflame with blossoms. Close by, a spring of fresh water bubbled up in the grass, and ran its few yards through the sands to the sea. It was a perfect camping place, and a perfectly joyous Christmas Day it was. A meal eaten amidst the loveliest of scenes, a gentle breeze that came as a caress; warmth and sunshine, and the low wash of the blue water; peace like a benediction over land and sea.

One hopes for more such halcyon days, knowing full well all the same that this old zest of life can never be recaptured.