Masterton, and Northward.

On to the north is Masterton, the chief town of the Wairarapa, a handsome well-furnished provincial metropolis, with all the makings of a city, and commanding a glorious view of the Tararua Ranges and of the great undulating and mountainous limestone country, famous for its growth of grass, on the east. The plain

“The clamour much, of men and dogs.”-James Thomson.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
White Rock Station, near Cape Palliser, Wairarapa, New Zealand.

around Masterton is mostly a country of small farms, and in normal seasons they are very profitable farms indeed. This is the land of fat stock and of wool, with dairy produce and fruit, which finds its way to Wellington for export. Local freezing works deal with the perishable products. The Masterton district may be described as the pick of the Wairarapa country.

Continuing northward, from Masterton, the railway passes over a fertile countryside, which half a century ago was all one vast forest, known as the Seventy-Mile Bush, and later, as its area became reduced, as the Forty-mile Bush. The forest extended as far north as Takapau, in southern Hawke's Bay. It was a task of enormous labour, the clearing away of this forest, in the era when our native bush was regarded simply as an encumbrance to be got rid of. This steady attack on the forest, as the preliminary to the farmers' enterprise, is the history of this goodly land all the way up to the southern part of Hawke's Bay, the territory of the “villes”—Maurice-ville, Woodville, Ormondville, and all the rest of them, where Scandinavian settlers were among the most industrious subduers of the wilds to the purposes of home-making and the making of a nation.