The Pathfinder.

It is a good, descriptive adventurous word, pathfinder, a title that takes one back to the romantic pages of Fenimore Cooper. We have had many splendid pioneers of wild New Zealand, but none better deserved to be termed pathfinder and discoverer than the late Sir Arthur Dudley Dobson, of Christ-church, whose useful life ended at over ninety. He was the frontiersman at his best, and the story of his life, which was told in the “New Zealand Railways Magazine” a few years ago, is in its way an inspiration to the young man to be up and doing. Dob-son was only twenty-two when he struct out as a leader of men, to survey the great unknown coast of West-land, meeting with many perils by sea and shore, but cheerfully conquering them all, and crowning his first professional undertaking by discovering the now famous Otira Gorge route across the Southern Alps. The name of Arthur's Pass imperishably commemorates his successful effort to search out a practicable route between east and west.

Sir Arthur Dudley Dobson was one of those men who preserve to the last the cheery and enthusiastic manner, the heart of a boy. He began a self-reliant career early, he was still actively interested in his profession at ninety. He knew the real New Zealand as few know it, he loved the ancient mountains and the fragrant glories of the bush; he was an intimate of Nature, a man full of camplore, wise in all the ways of the snow country, the dangerous rivers, the forest where one had to rely in emergency on the wilds for food. In his profession he was highly skilled. He knew many of the notable scientific men of three generations ago. No New Zealand pioneer did more to make the country fit for traffic and settlement. He played his part well, in his own way, on the New Zealand stage of life, in the great story that we may call the “The Breaking-in.”