The driver of the Prince's car, a grey-headed Anglo-Saxon, was descended from men who had driven mail coaches along this road seventy years ago, when the route was anything but the tourist trip it has become to-day. The Prince was shown corner after corner where early settlers and their vehicles had gone over the edge, to be gathered together at the bottom in an advanced state of disunion. He heard also the oft-told tale of the Maungatapu highwaymen, white desperadoes, who once made these Rai and Wangamoa hills their home, until they were rounded up and hanged by indignant gold-miners and settlers for iniquities which included the murdering of a wayfarer, after stripping him of his purse, though all that it contained was a solitary shilling. No allowance seemed to have been made by his avengers for a certain natural disappointment. From the Rai and Wangamoa highlands the road led downwards, through a gradually flattening land of apple-trees, still laden with masses of enormous yellow and red fruit, past hundreds of acres of bare poles, where hops had recently been reaped, amongst fields of peach trees set in ordered ranks, through villages of red-roofed, verandahed wooden houses, where well-dressed women and extraordinarily chubby and sunburnt children strewed the chrysanthemums of autumn as the Prince went by. The white macadam of the country ultimately gave place to the dark asphalt of the town. Tram-lines appeared in the track, and the procession found itself amongst hurrahing crowds in Nelson city. Nelson is built round a central hill. Driving up the main street, the Prince was in a lane of people, a waving mass of union jacks extending up the business street on either side, while in front was a natural grand-stand surmounted by the Gothic windows of a pink, wooden structure which rose out of the top of a variegated pyramid and was the Cathedral. It looked as if balanced upon a hunched-up, gaily-coloured Paisley shawl. As we approached, the base resolved itself into school-children in white, soldiers and cadets in khaki, with a phalanx of returned men in their habit as they lived. A grey stone platform, with steps leading up to it, was occupied by Nelson's officials, one of whom read an address of welcome. The remainder of the variegated colour scheme seen from the bottom of the street was due to the costumes of ladies who stood so close to one another that no peep of the green background came through.