Although so close to the hills, Christchurch stands upon almost absolutely level ground, a corner indeed of the big Canterbury plain, _par excellence_ the farming country of the Dominion. The city contains cold-storage plant, a biscuit factory, and wool and hide establishments, all of which proved their Imperial value during the war. It also possesses one of the best high schools in the country, run on the lines of a British public school. Being also the distributing centre for a large and flourishing farming community, Christchurch is going ahead rapidly, and has an excellent future before it, its south-of-England climate making it a favourite place of residence. Farming is not in New Zealand an occupation penalized by the dread of hardship or burden as one is apt to find it elsewhere, largely because of the real love the New Zealander has for the land. The Mayor of one of the larger cities we visited in the Northern Island, himself a prosperous wholesale grocer, told me that neither of his two sons, when they returned to New Zealand from France, would look at his business, though he had kept it going longer than he would otherwise have done, with the express purpose of handing it on to them, there being no one else in his family to whom to leave it. They both insisted upon being set up as farmers. The reason they gave was that farming life was pleasanter and less exacting than any kind of business, and this although they had, with farming, to begin all over again, whereas in the wholesale grocery trade they had a long established and flourishing concern ready to step into. The fifteen-year-old son of a prominent official said to his mother, who passed on the irreverent observation to me, "Isn't father a loony to do office work when he might have a farm of his own?" The boy's mind was typical. I met refined women who said they wouldn't live anywhere in the world but on a farm, and never once did I come across anyone who was on the land and wanted to get off it. This attitude of mind has the qualification that it is sheep and cattle-farming that is referred to, and not dairy-farming, which is infinitely more exacting, though, at present prices, and especially since the discovery of the possibilities of the dried milk-trade, definitely more profitable. This is because the sheep and cattle-farmer is not continually tied, and, while he has to work hard at times, can also often get away, whereas the dairy-farmer must be on hand all the year round, to see that the milking is attended to, and that the milk is promptly disposed of at the creameries, of which numbers are springing up, mostly run, upon a co-operative basis, by groups of farmers themselves.