Town and Country To-day.

Those are some tales and memories of the pre-railway Taumarunui. The period of transition from a Hauhau camp and a closed frontier to a lively and ofttimes bacchanalian era as head of the iron road, and so on to its present settled and prosperous condition, was not long-drawn-out; it did not extend over the space of an average lifetime, but it was crowded with the incidents that would make a very readable history.

Now, though the old war-canoes that once swung at the river banks have gone, though the old war parties have passed on, though the railway-makers have been scattered far and wide, there remains some of the bush frontier atmosphere about Taumarunui. The life of the forest that still exists, the life of the hard-toiling bushmen, the even more strenuous toil of the farmer in new country, the wild glories of the great Wanganui River and its bush canyon, all give the traveller every warrant for making the heart-of-the-island town a kind of scenic field base.

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