Mountain Adoration.

Our most beautiful of mountains, Taranaki—its ancient name is to be preferred to Egmont, which fits it not at all—has excited the admiration, and more than admiration, of all Japanese visitors to New Zealand. Japanese sailors in steamers crossing the Tasman Sea have gone down on their knees in worshipful obeisance at the sight of Taranaki's snowy peak rising from the waters, because it reminded them so of their own sacred Fujiyama. When the two Japanese warships left Wellington lately for Fiji, Admiral Imamura took his course up the West Coast in order to get a close view of the mountain of which he had heard so much from earlier naval visitors. He so timed his departure, apparently, as to be off the Taranaki coast at daylight in the morning. I should like to have been on board the Jap. ships that morning when the glorious peak stood revealed with the first of the sunlight setting its snows aglow.

New Zealanders, it strikes me, could well take example from this keen poetic appreciation of the beautiful, a sense of the spiritual which is very strong in the Japanese people and too often lacking in our own. The Japanese reverence lovely things; they do not hack and burn and destroy their native forests and plant ugly and depressing pinus insignis and macrocarpa in their place.