At Hamilton, a town of ten thousand inhabitants, more formal ceremonies were gone through. The whole place was decorated. The people assembled in the streets, where they cheered most vigorously. Several hundred returned soldiers, and a very large number of children, stood in lines upon the racecourse where they were inspected by the Prince. Several addresses of welcome were read, that from the local municipality being presented by Mayor Watt, a prominent Hamilton solicitor and a man of much influence, also of dramatic instinct it appeared, since he discarded for this occasion the chains and ermine of his official garb, in favour of the private's uniform he had worn at the front. A few stations further on, five hundred children were upon the platform, singing "God Bless the Prince of Wales," as the train went past. They had come in from a neighbouring mining-camp to catch a glimpse of the Royal visitor, who waved to them from his carriage. The flourishing coal-mining centre of Huntley, where a valuable brown lignite, capable of being coked, is being raised in large quantities from shafts, some of which are only three hundred feet deep, was also passed, the inhabitants assembling along the railway line and cheering as the train went through. A large experimental farm, where the secret of converting barren land into fruitful by means of basic slag has been discovered; cold storage factories where incredible masses of New Zealand mutton are being preserved for export; and extensive works where pumice, here found in the scoria of long-extinct volcanoes, is turned into material for the insulating of boilers, passed in procession before the train. We saw also peat-swamps, in process of profitable reclamation by means of drainage, in the valley of the wide Waikato stream. Presently a second engine was attached to the train, which now crept slowly upwards, through a tangled wilderness of dense-forested gorge and mountain canyon, the scenery being of the wildest. The imported spruce, oak, willow, and ash of the more settled region gave place to feathery green _punga_ tree-ferns, and stiff brown _tawa_ of indigenous growth. Clearings were seen at intervals where cultivation struggled with the grey, bushy _manuka_ scrub; well-kept fields, in the hands of white settlers, alternating with unkempt jungle, where the easy-going communal _hapu_ tenure of Maori ownership is still in force. Suddenly, the scenery opened up, and we saw, in the soft rays of the setting sun, a wide panorama of blue lake, and olive-green headland, round the dark, conical Mokoia island, famous in Maori tradition as the trysting-place to which Princess Hinomaa and her lover Tutanekai swam across the lake. Here, almost in the shadow of the Tarawera volcano, which blew up with terrific results to the countryside thirty years ago, we found the pleasant little station of Rotorua, where an address was presented and the Prince shook hands with a long line of returned Maori soldiers.