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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 7, Issue 5 (September 1, 1932)

[section]

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Here there is room to breathe and think,
Here there is space for souls to grow,
And life may run as pleasantly
As Maitai's waters flow.”

There is another verse in David McKee Wright's poem on Nelson which avers that “here trade's loud wheels but slowly turn.” Super-sensitive citizens, however, may not regard this as a compliment to their town. There once was a jibe about “sleepy Nelson,” but it is long out of date. The truth is that Nelson city, with its highly productive wealthy province, endowed with rich soil and pleasant climate, is anything but slow in trade or behind the times in business methods. Commerce here is many-sided and the general impression the traveller gets of Nelson is a place of vigorous development and an export trade that is steadily on the increase.

At the same time there is an atmosphere of a very special charm that distinguishes the clean white town and the country around it—an air of content and comfort, of green and leafy spaces, of serene, fruitful valleys, of shelter from the roystering winds of which Wellington, across the water, gets the full and over-bracing benefit.

There was a peculiar charm, too, in one's first introduction to Nelson. It was in the old mail-coach days, overlanding from Have-lock, at the head of Pelorus Sound, where the coaches came through from Blenheim to Nelson. On the box-seat behind one of Newman's good four-horse teams, it was very pleasant that bright summer day, speeding through the woody Rai Valley and climbing the Whangamoa Saddle, where the settler's hand had not yet quite destroyed the beauty of the forested range. A sound of music, strange to hear in such a place, came down the valley, and round a bend in the bush-girt road came a coach with all the people on top playing away at instruments. There were cornets and oboes and flageolets and I don't know what else, and a couple of girl fiddlers, and they swept past us playing away like “Billy-be-damned,” as our driver so accurately described it, and scarcely giving us a glance. We looked back to see them roll round another bend, and after they were out of sight we could still hear the strains coming faintly from the bush. They were a touring family of musicians and entertainers, very popular at that day, and they rehearsed as they travelled along in their own vehicle from town to town, thereby killing two birds with the one stone. And then, with that poetic prelude, we went along over the hills and down into Happy Valley, the calm waters of Tasman Bay glimmering on our right far away to the hazy blue shore of sunset-land, and so into Nelson in the cool of the evening.