One of the most cheerful features in New Zealand country life, perhaps, is the extent to which those who own the land are taking root in the soil. Far the greater part of the settled country is in the hands of men and families who live on the land, and may go on living there as long as they please; no one can oust them. They are either freeholders, or tenants of the State or public bodies. Such tenants hold their lands on terms so easy that their position as working farmers is as good as or better than that of freeholders. As prospective sellers of land they may not be so well placed; but that is another story. Anyway, rural New Zealand is becoming filled with capable independent farmers, with farms of all sizes from the estate of four thousand or five thousand acres to the peasant holding of fifty or one hundred. Colonists still think in large areas when they define the degrees of land-holding and ownership. [Illustration: ON THE BEACH AT NGUNGURU] And here a New Zealander, endeavouring to make a general sketch that may place realities clearly before the English eye, is confronted with the difficulty, almost impossibility, of helping the European to conceive a thinly peopled territory. Suppose, for a moment, what the British Islands would be like if they were populated on the New Zealand scale--that is to say, if they held about a million souls, of whom fifty thousand were brown and the rest white. The brown would be English-speaking and half civilised, and the whites just workaday Britons of the middle and labouring classes, better fed, a little taller and rather more tanned by sun and wind. That at first sight does not seem to imply any revolutionary change. But imagine yourself standing on the deck of a steamer running up the English Channel past the coast as it would look if nineteen-twentieths of the British population, and all traces of them and the historic past of their country, had been swept away. The cliff edges of Cornwall and hills of Devon would be covered with thick forest, and perhaps a few people might cluster round single piers in sheltered inlets like Falmouth and Plymouth. The Chalk Downs of Wiltshire and Hampshire would be held by a score or two of sheep-farmers, tenants of the Crown, running their flocks over enormous areas of scanty grass. Fertile strips like the vale of Blackmore would be occupied by independent farmers with from three hundred to two thousand acres of grass and crops round their homesteads. Southampton would be the largest town in the British Islands, a flourishing and busy seaport, containing with its suburbs not less than 90,000 people. Its inhabitants would proudly point to the railway system, of which they were the terminus, and by which they were connected with Liverpool, the second city of the United Kingdom, holding with Birkenhead about 70,000 souls. Journeying from Southampton to Liverpool on a single line of rails, the traveller would note a