Decentralised as New Zealand is, large as its rural population is, and pleasant as its country life can be, still its four chief towns hold between them more than a quarter of its people, and cannot therefore be passed over in a sentence. Europeans are apt to be impatient of colonial towns, seeing in them collections of buildings neither large enough to be imposing nor old enough to be mellowed into beauty or quaintness. And it is true that in our four cities you have towns without architectural or historic interest, and in size only about equal to Hastings, Oxford, Coventry, and York. Yet these towns, standing where seventy years ago nothing stood, have other features of interest beside their newness. Cities are, after all, chiefly important as places in which civilised men and women can live decently and comfortably, and do their daily work under conditions which are healthy and neither degrading nor disagreeable. The first business of a city is to be useful, and its second to be healthy. Certainly it should not be hideous; but our cities are not hideous. What if the streets tend to straight rigidity, while the dwelling-houses are mostly of wood, and the brick and stone business edifices embody modern commercialism! The European visitor will note these features; but he will note also the spirit of cleanliness, order, and convenience everywhere active among a people as alert and sturdy as they are well fed and comfortably clad. The unconcealed pride of the colonist in material progress may sometimes jar a little on the tourist in search of the odd, barbaric, or picturesque. But the colonist, after all, is building up a civilised nation. Art, important as it is, cannot be the foundation of a young state. [Illustration: DUNEDIN]