Dusky's Sandfly Rocks, and Ulva's Isle.

There are, of course, some islands one would not have as a gift. Down in Dusky Sound there are forty islets within the radius of about a mile, besides Resolution Island and other large ones. The only man who ever lived there for long of his own free choice was that enthusiastic naturalist, Richard Henry, who was Government custodian of Resolution, and afterwards of Kapiti Island bird sanctuary. He was so interested in the native bird life that he quite ignored the sandfly and mosquito plagues. He, like Donald Sutherland, the pioneer of Milford Sound, was quite happy in his tremendous solitudes, and was quite content to wait six months for his mailbag and his boxes of groceries from civilisation.

But the far South has less solitary islands than those of Fiordland. One of the prettiest little water-girt homes I have seen is that of a Shetland Islander who had settled on Ulva Island, in Patterson Inlet, the islet-strewn gulf of Stewart Island. There was the cleanest little half-moon of sandy shelly beach, with the owner's boathouse at the head, then there was a walk through native bush to the Crusoe's cottage, with its garden and its collection of plants and shrubs from many foreign lands, a botanical museum of a quality one never expected to see in so remote a place. The old-timer had a little store by the beach, and on Saturday, the Inlet habitants' shopping day, there would be white and brown sails flecking the gulf, all making for Ulva's Isle, from the half-caste Maori settlement at The Neck. It was their most convenient place for replenishing their stocks of tea and sugar and flour and tobacco. There is no place quite like Ulva in all New Zealand in its blended atmosphere of bush life and gardenland, sailoring and trading, a bit of each.