Loosely speaking, New Zealand is a volcanic archipelago. There are hot pools and a noted sanatorium in the Hanmer plains in the middle of the Middle Island. There are warm springs far to the north of Auckland, near Ohaeawai, where the Maori once gave our troops a beating in the early days of our race-conflict with them. Auckland itself, the queen of New Zealand towns, is almost a crater city. At any rate, it is surrounded by dead craters. You are told that from a hill-top in the suburbs you may count sixty-three volcanic cones. Two sister towns, Wellington and Christchurch, have been repeatedly taken and well shaken by Mother Earth. Old Wellington settlers will gravely remind you that some sixty years ago a man, an inoffensive German baron, lost his life in a shock there. True, he was not swallowed up or crushed by falling ruins; a mirror fell from a wall on to his head. This earthquake was followed in 1855 by another as sharp, and one of the two so alarmed a number of pioneer settlers that they embarked on shipboard to flee from so unquiet a land. Their ship, however, so the story runs, went ashore near the mouth of Wellington harbour, and they returned to remain, and, in some cases, make their fortunes. In 1888 a double shock of earthquake wrecked some feet of the cathedral spire at Christchurch, nipping off the point of it and the gilded iron cross which it sustained, so that it stood for many months looking like a broken lead-pencil. A dozen years later, Cheviot, Amuri, and Waiau were sharply shaken by an earthquake that showed scant mercy to brick chimneys and houses of the material known as cob-and-clay. Finally, in the little Kermadec islets, far to the north of Cape Maria Van Diemen, we encounter hot pools and submarine explosions, and passing seamen have noted there sheets of ejected pumice floating and forming a scum on the surface of the ocean. As might be supposed, guides and hangers-on about Roto-rua and Taupo revel in tales of hairbreadth escapes and hair-raising fatalities. Nine generations ago, say the Maori, a sudden explosion of a geyser scalded to death half the villagers of Ohinemutu. In the way of smaller mishaps you are told how, as two Maori children walked together by Roto-mahana one slipped and broke through the crust of silica into the scalding mud beneath. The other, trying to lift him out, was himself dragged in and both were boiled alive. Near Ohinemutu, three revellers, overfull of confidence and bad rum, stepped off a narrow track at night and perished together in sulphurous mud and scalding steam. At the extremity of Boiling Point a village, or part of a village, is said to have been suddenly engulfed in the waters of Roto-rua. At the southern end of Taupo there is, or was, a legend current that a large _wharé_ filled with dancers met, in a moment, a similar fate. In one case of which I heard, that of a Maori woman, who fell into a pool of a temperature above boiling-point,