For Bush and Mountain.

Some of our ambitious young amateur mountaineers get out from the towns wearing little more than the much-photographed costume of Mr. Gandhi. Even a Maori warrior on the tomahawk path would have displayed more judgment in the matter of clothing if he were going into the hill country. Shorts and thin singlets and that sort of thing are well enough for brief tramps across the lower lands, in the middle of summer; but higher country and lower temperatures call for more rational clothes. Long experience in many parts of New Zealand, in bush and mountain land, has convinced me that the page 46 knickerbockers and long stockings costume is the most comfortable and the most suitable for rough country and possible rough weather.

In such regions as the Urewera Country, in the days before roads and bridges, I found that the best place for trousers was in the swag, there was so much river crossing to be done. But that lack of covering to be done. But that lack of covering would not do for, say, the Fiordland National Park. “Tenderfoot” travellers have been known to wear shorts, a rig right enough for the running track or the tennis lawn or the football field, for the walk from Lake Te Anau across McKinnon's Pass to Milford Sound. They were literally tenderlegs, very tender, by the time the sandflies and mosquitoes had finished with them. Large areas of exposed skin are a sad mistake in Fiordland.