In an exceptionally dry summer--such an extraordinary season as came in January and February of this year--the fire goes to work on a grand scale. In a tract a hundred miles long, thirty or forty outbreaks may be reported within a week. Settlers looking out from their homesteads may see smoke and glowing skies in half-a-dozen directions at once. Now the blaze may approach from this direction, now from that, just as the wind freshens or shifts. Sheep are mustered, and, if possible, driven away. Threatened householders send their furniture away, or dig holes in the ground and bury it. When the danger comes too suddenly to give time for anything more, goods are hastily piled on some bare patch and covered with wet blankets. I have read of a prudent settler who had prepared for these risks of fire by excavating a cave almost large enough to house a band of prophets. After three years the fire came his way, and he duly stored away his possessions in the repository. But just as rain does not fall when you take out a large umbrella, so our provident friend found that the fire would not touch his house. He lost nothing but a shed. [Illustration: MORNING ON THE WANGANUI RIVER] If there appears any fair chance of beating back the flames, the men join together, form a line, and give battle. They do not lightly surrender the fruits of years of toil, but will fight rolling smoke, flying sparks, and even scorching flame, hour after hour. Strips of grass are burned off in advance, and dead timber blown up with dynamite. Buckets of water are passed from hand to hand, or the flames are beaten out with sacks or blankets. Seen at night on a burning hill-side, the row of masculine fighting figures stands out jet-black against the red glow, and the wild attitudes and desperate exertions are a study for an artist. Among the men, boys work gleefully; there is no school for them when a fire has to be beaten. Very young children suffer greatly from the smoke with which the air they breathe is laden, perhaps for days together. Even a Londoner would find its volumes trying. Now and again a bushman in the thick of the fight reels half-suffocated, or falls fainting and has to be carried away. But his companions work on; and grass-fires are often stopped and standing crops saved. But fire running through thick bush is a more formidable affair. The heat is terrific, the very soil seems afire; and indeed the flames, after devouring trunks and branches, will work down into the roots and consume them for many feet. Sparks and tongues of flame shoot across roads and streams and start a blaze on the farther side. Messengers riding for help, or settlers trying to reach their families, have often to run the gauntlet perilously on tracks which the fire has reached or is crossing. They gallop through when they can, sometimes with hair and beard singed and clothes smelling of the fire. Men, however, very seldom lose their lives. For one who dies by