The Road and the Town.

Your short train run from Christchurch to Little River station, at the foot of the hills, takes you past the shores of two Jakes of quite different characters— Ellesmere, the Waihora of the Maoris, raupo-reed edged, wide and shallow, teeming with wild ducks, pitkeko and black swan, and Lake Forsyth, or Wairewa, a deep, narrow loch which a poetic legend says the long-ago explorer Rakaihaitu hollowed out with his gigantic ko or digging implement, between the steep-to ranges. Then the transition from the plains to the hills is quick and dramatic. It is all ups and downs thence to that prettiest of small towns, Akaroa, set all among its trees and flowers and fruit on the curving shore of the most secure harbour on the Canterbury coast.

Many qualities of charm combine to give Akaroa its peculiar attractiveness for the visitor. When first I went there, over the hills in the old horse-coach days, I thought there was nothing in the settled parts of the Island so serenely beautiful as that look-out from Hilltop, the halfway halting place, over the long easy slants of green pasture-land and dark little copses of wildwood to the long harbour, calm as a quiet lake, glinting among its grassy slopes and its trees far below.

The town itself is in keeping with the blending of pastoral and sylvan loveliness in its approaches. Modernised as it is in the essentials of a town—electric light, drainage, and other necessary utilities of a comfortable urban life—it still partakes more of the country than the town in its character of beauty. It is a town of groves and gardens, of leafy old lanes, of lovers' walks and little parks, of bird-song and water-song, of scented hedgerows, and orchards that dangle their fruit-laden branches within tempting reach of the footpath stroller. There are old-fashioned homes and churches; the townspeople's homes often seem carved out of the tree-groves, native and exotic, rather than to have had those trees planted about them.