they do not dress in the faultless fashion of those English masters of fox-hounds whose portraits flame on the walls of the Royal Academy. Some at least of them do their own grooming. Yet, speaking generally, the impression left is neat and workmanlike, and is none the worse for a certain simplicity and even a touch of roughness. The meets are pleasant gatherings, all the more so because they are neither overcrowded, nor are there too many of them. Much the same may be said of the polo matches, where good riding and good ponies are to be seen. Twenty years ago trained ponies could be bought in the islands for £25 apiece. Now they, in common with all horseflesh, are a good deal more costly. However, sport in New Zealand, though more expensive than of yore, is still comparatively cheap, and that, and the absence of crowds, are among its chief attractions. As in other countries, there are tens of thousands of men and women who never ride a horse, but who find in horse-racing--or in attending race-meetings--an absorbing amusement. The number of race-meetings held in both islands is very great. Flat-racing, hurdle-racing, steeplechasing, and trotting,--all these can assemble their votaries in thousands. Sportsmen and others think little of traversing hundreds of miles of land or sea to attend one of the larger meetings. Ladies muster at these almost as strongly as men. As for the smaller meetings up-country, they, of course, are social gatherings of the easiest and most cheerful sort. In bygone years they not seldom degenerated towards evening into uproarious affairs. Nowadays, however, race-meetings, small and large, are marked by a sobriety which, to a former generation, might have seemed wasteful and depressing. To a stranger the chief features of the races appear to be their number, the size of the stakes, the average quality of the horses, and the working of the totalisator. This last, a betting machine, is in use wherever the law will allow it, and is a source of profit both to the Government and the racing clubs. The Government taxes its receipts, and the clubs retain ten per cent of them; hence the handsome stakes offered by the jockey club committees. The sum that passes through these machines in the course of the year is enormous, and represents, in the opinion of many, a national weakness and evil. In defence of the totalisator it is argued that the individual wagers which it registers are small, and that it has almost put an end to a more ruinous and disastrous form of betting, that with bookmakers. It is certainly a popular institution with an odd flavour of democracy about it, for it has levelled down betting and at the same time extended it. Indeed, it almost seems to exhaust the gambling element in New Zealand life; for, as compared with other nations, my countrymen are not especially addicted to throwing away their money on games of chance.