Scarcely anywhere can the eye take in the whole of an inlet at once. The narrower fiords wind, the wider are sprinkled with islets. As the vessel slowly moves on, the scene changes; a fresh vista opens out with every mile; the gazer comes to every bend with undiminished expectation. The two longest of the gulfs measure twenty-two miles from gates to inmost ends. Milford is barely nine miles long--but how many scenes are met with in those nine! No sooner does the sense of confinement between dark and terrific heights become oppressive than some high prospect opens out to the upward gaze, and the sunshine lightens up the wooded shoulders and glittering snow-fields of some distant mount. Then the whole realm is so utterly wild, so unspoiled and unprofaned. Man has done nothing to injure or wreck it. Nowhere have you to avert your eyes to avoid seeing blackened tracts, the work of axe and fire. The absurdities of man’s architecture are not here, nor his litter, dirt and stenches. The clean, beautiful wilderness goes on and on, far as the eye can travel and farther by many a league. Protected on one side by the ocean, on the other by the mountainous labyrinth, it stretches with its deep gulfs and virgin valleys to remain the delight and refreshment of generations wearied with the smoke and soilure of the cities of men. [Illustration: ON THE CLINTON RIVER] We often call this largest of our national parks a paradise. To apply the term to such a wilderness is a curious instance of change in the use of words. The Persian “paradise” was a hunting-ground where the great king could chase wild beasts without interruption. In our south-west, on the contrary, guns and bird-snaring are alike forbidden, and animal life is preserved, not to be hunted, but to be observed. As most of my readers know, the birds of our islands, by their variety and singularity, atone for the almost complete absence of four-footed mammals. The most curious are the flightless kinds. Not that these comprise all that is interesting in our bird-life by any means. The rare stitch-bird; those beautiful singers, the tui, bell-bird, and saddle-back; many marine birds, and those friendly little creatures the robins and fantails of the bush, amuse others as well as the zoologists. But the flightless birds--the roa, the grey kiwi, the takahé, the kakapo, the flightless duck of the Aucklands, and the weka--are our chief scientific treasures, unless the tuatara lizard and the short-tailed bat may be considered to rival them. Some of our ground-birds have the further claim on the attention of science, that they are the relatives of the extinct and gigantic moa. That monstrous, and probably harmless, animal was exterminated by fires and Maori hunters centuries ago. Bones, eggs, and feathers remain to attest its former numbers, and the roa and kiwi to give the unscientific a notion of its looks and habits. The story of the thigh-bone which found