by day and night the air of the forest is pleasant to the nostrils. A disagreeable exception among our plants is the coprosma, emphatically called _fœtidissima_, concerning which bushmen, entangled in its thickets, have used language which might turn bullock-drivers green with envy. [Illustration: AUCKLAND] The navigators who discovered or traded with our islands while they were still a No Man’s Land have recorded their admiration of the timber of our forests. The tall sticks of kauri and kahikatea, with their scores of feet of clean straight wood, roused the sailors’ enthusiasm. It seemed to them that they had chanced upon the finest spars in the world. And for two generations after Captain Cook, trees picked out in the Auckland bush, and roughly trimmed there, were carried across on the decks of trading schooners to Sydney, and there used by Australian shipbuilders. In the year 1819 the British Government sent a store-ship, the _Dromedary_, to the Bay of Islands for a cargo of kauri spars. They were to be suitable for top-masts, so to be from seventy-four to eighty-four feet long and from twenty-one to twenty-three inches thick. After much chaffering with the native chiefs the spars were cut and shipped, and we owe to the expedition an interesting book by an officer on board the _Dromedary_. Our export of timber has always been mainly from Auckland, and for many years has been chiefly of kauri logs or sawn timber. There has been some export of white pine to Australia for making butter-boxes; but the kauri has been the mainstay of the timber trade oversea. Other woods are cut and sawn in large quantities, but the timber is consumed within the colony. How large the consumption is may be seen from the number of saw-mills at work--411--and their annual output, which was 432,000,000 superficial feet last year. Add to this a considerable amount cut for firewood, fences, and rough carpentering, which does not pass through the mills. And then, great as is the total quantity made use of, the amount destroyed and wasted is also great. Accidental fires, sometimes caused by gross carelessness, ravage thousands of acres. “A swagger will burn down a forest to light his pipe,” said Sir Julius Vogel, and the epigram was doubtless true of some of the swag-carrying tribe. But the average swagger is a decent enough labourer on the march in search of work, and not to be classed with the irreclaimable vagrant called tramp in Britain. In any case the swagger was never the sole or main offender where forest fires were concerned. It would be correct to say that gum-diggers sometimes burn down a forest in trying to clear an acre of scrub. But bush fires start up from twenty different causes. Sparks from a saw-mill often light up a blaze which may end in consuming the mill and its surroundings. I have heard of a dogmatic settler who was so positive that his grass would not burn that he threw a lighted match into a tuft of it by way of demonstration. A puff of