Plantations of exotic trees grow in number and height yearly, and show a curious blending of the flora of England, California, and Australia. Most British trees and bushes thrive exceedingly, though some of them, as the ash, the spruce, the holly, and the whitethorn, find the summers too hot and the winters not frosty enough in many localities. More than in trees, hedgerows, or corn-crops, the handiwork of the colonist is seen in the ever-widening areas sown with English grasses. Everything has to give way to grass. The consuming passion of the New Zealand settler is to make grass grow where it did not grow before, or where it did grow before, to put better grass in its place. So trees, ferns, flax, and rushes have to pass away; with them have to go the wiry native tussock and tall, blanched snow-grass. Already thirteen million acres are sown with one or other mixture of cock’s-foot, timothy, clover, rye-grass, fescue--for the New Zealand farmer is knowing in grasses; and every year scores of thousands of acres are added to the area thus artificially grassed. Can you wonder? The carrying power of acres improved in this way is about nine times that of land left in native pasture; while as for forest and fern land, they, before man attacked them, could carry next to no cattle or sheep at all. In the progress of settlement New Zealand is sacrificing much beauty in the districts once clad in forest. Outside these, however, quite half the archipelago was already open land when the whites came, and in this division the work of the settler has been almost entirely improvement. Forty years ago it needed all the gold of the sunshine and all the tonic quality of the air to make the wide tracts of stunted bracken in the north, and even wider expanses of sparse yellowish tussock in the south, look anything but cheerless, empty, and half-barren. The pages of many early travellers testify to this and tell of an effect of depression now quite absent. Further, for fifteen years past the process of settling the soil has not been confined to breaking in the wilderness and enlarging the frontiers of cultivated and peopled land. This good work is indeed going on. But hand in hand with it there goes on a process of subdivision by which fresh homes rise yearly in districts already accounted settled; the farmstead chimneys send up their smoke ever nearer to each other; and the loneliness and consequent dulness that once half spoiled country life is being brightened. Very few New Zealanders now need live without neighbours within an easy ride, if not walk. [Illustration: ON THE BEALEY RIVER]