Otherwise the Chatham islanders have gone on for the last forty years living quietly in the soft sea-air of their little Arcadia, without roads and without progress. They grow wool and export it; for the rest, they exist. A small steamer visits them half-a-dozen times a year, and brings news, groceries, and clothes, also the correct time. Great is the tribulation when her coming is delayed. A friend of mine who witnessed a belated arrival tells me that the boat found a famine raging. The necessaries lacking, however, were not food, but tobacco and hairpins. The 60,000 sheep depastured on the islands have played havoc with some of the native vegetation, and have brought down retribution in the shape of moving drifts of blown sea-sand, whereby many acres of good pasture have been overwhelmed. However, that wonderful binding grass, the marram, has been used to stop the sand, and is said to have stayed the scourge. Much native “bush” is still left, and shows the curious spectacle of a forest where trees spread luxuriantly but do not grow to much more than twenty feet in height. That, says Professor Dendy, is due to the sea-winds--not cold, but laden with salt. In this woodland you may see a veronica which has become a tree, a kind of sandalwood, and a palm peculiar to the islands. That beautiful flower, the Chatham Island lily--which, by the way, is not a lily,--blooms in many a New Zealand garden. * * * * * The Auckland Isles lie some three hundred miles south of our mainland. They are nearly four times the size of St. Helena, where, as we know, several thousand people have in the past managed to live, chiefly on beef and a British garrison. No one, however, now lives in the Aucklands. New Zealanders speak of their climate in much the same strain as Frenchmen use when talking of November fogs in London. There are, however, worse climates in several parts of the United Kingdom. It does not always rain there; there are many spots where you are sheltered from the wind. It is not so cold but that tree-ferns will grow--the group is their southern limit. The leaning or bowed habits of the forest are due as much, perhaps, to the peaty soil as to the sou’westers. Vegetables flourish; goats, pigs, and cattle thrive. So far are the valleys and hill-sides from being barren that their plant-life is a joy to the New Zealand botanists, who pray for nothing so much as that settlement may hold its hand and not molest this floral paradise. Pleurophyllums, celmisias, gentians, veronicas, grass-trees, spread beside the sea-gulfs as though in sub-alpine meadows. The leaves are luxuriant, the flowers richer in colour than on our main islands. The jungle of crouching rata tinges the winding shores with its summer scarlet. Dense as are the wind-beaten groves, the scrub that covers the higher slopes is still more closely woven. The forest you may creep through; the scrub is virtually impenetrable. A friend of mine, anxious