If we think of the products which are most valuable to New Zealand at the present day, we shall find that with the exception of timber they have been introduced from abroad by the white settlers and were unknown to the Maoris. But the marshland, dear to the Maori heart, produces one plant which was necessary to the natives in the past and is still very useful to us. This is the New Zealand flax, though it is more like hemp than the flax from which linen is made in the northern hemisphere. The Maoris wove the fibre of this plant into clothes. Here we see the long 50 blade-like leaves being cut in the swamp; we follow it to the mills where it is unloaded and sorted into lengths. Inside the mill it is put through various processes until the fibre finally appears as a rope or bale of fine white twine ready for the 51 market. In this form it is sent from the mill all over the world and commands prices as high as Manila hemp with which perhaps we are more familiar. We will now leave the south and pay a short visit to the northern districts. Here the conditions are somewhat different. There is gold to be found at the base of the Coromandel Peninsula, and it is mined largely from the quartz rock, not merely washed from the alluvium as in South Island. This has led to the growth of a group of small mining towns. There is coal, too, in the basin of the Waikato and in the districts north of Auckland. The presence of these minerals in itself would lead us to expect a difference between the north and south of the island; but the difference extends further, to the vegetable products of the soil. We are moving out of the west wind region into the zone where, as in Victoria, the greater part of the rain falls in the mild winter, and the summer is dry and hot though tempered by the nearness of the sea. It is a land where the orange and the vine grow well, in great contrast to the cool and moist region in the south of South Island. Many people find the change from Auckland to Dunedin or Invercargill very trying to the constitution.