Deer-stalking in New Zealand can scarcely be recommended as an easy diversion for rich and elderly London gentlemen. It is not sport for the fat and scant-of-breath who may be suffering from sedentary living and a plethora of public banquets. New Zealand hills are steep, new Zealand forests and scrubs are dense or matted. Even the open country of the mountains requires lungs of leather and sinews of wire. The hunter when unlucky cannot solace his evenings with gay human society or with the best cookery to be found in a luxurious, civilised country. If he be an old bush-hand, skilful at camping-out, he may make himself fairly comfortable in a rough way, but that is all. Nor are such things as big drives, or slaughter on a large scale, to be had at any price. Shooting licences are cheap--they can be had from the secretary of an acclimatisation society for from one to three pounds; but the number of stags a man is permitted to shoot in any one district varies from two to six. To get these, weeks of physical labour and self-denial may be required. On the other hand, trustworthy guides may be engaged, and colonial hospitality may vary the rigours of camp life. Then, too, may be counted the delights of a mountain life, the scenery of which excels Scotland, while the freshness of the upland air is brilliant and exhilarating in a fashion that Britons can scarcely imagine. And to counterbalance loneliness, the hunter has the sensation of undisturbed independence and freedom from the trammels of convention, as he looks round him in a true wilderness which the hand of man has not yet gashed or fouled. Wild-fowl shooting ranges from tame butchery of trustful native pigeons and parrots to the pursuit of the nimble godwit, and of that wary bird and strong flyer, the grey duck. The godwit is so interesting a bird to science that one almost wonders that ornithologists do not petition Parliament to have it declared _tapu_. They tell us that in the Southern winter it migrates oversea and makes no less a journey than that from New Zealand to Northern Siberia by way of Formosa and the Sea of Okhotsk. Even if this distance is covered in easy stages during three months’ time, it seems a great feat of bird instinct, and makes one regret that the godwit so often returns to our tidal inlets only to fall a prey to some keen sportsmen indifferent to its migratory achievements.