at anchor under Sir George's windows, when they have landed
his visitors and his post-bag. The voyage to such a spot was
in itself delightful, with such a prospect at the close of it.

We started on a still, warm morning after breakfast. Our
first halt was at Waiwera, fifteen miles off--an ambitious little
watering-place with a hot spring of its own, and a large,
handsome boarding-house, where the Auckland people go to
refresh themselves in sultry weather. We landed passengers
on a shallow beach, horses and carts coming down for them
into the water to the boats. A day or two could have been
spent pleasantly there if we could have afforded them, but time
was inexorable. We touched again and again for one purpose
or another. Late in the afternoon, we brought up at a pier
at a river's mouth where there was a considerable business.
We had stores on board from the Auckland merchants for the
farmhouses higher up the stream, which the young farmers and
their wives were waiting in their boats to receive and carry
home--a pretty and interesting scene, the first sight of New
Zealand country life of a healthy sort which we had met with,
the first sign of genuine growth; watering-places, and mush-
room cities, and members of the legislature being exotics of
uncertain continuance. The steamer herself was not amiss.
She was a poor little tug, but she struggled along at fair
speed. The cabin was clean, and they gave us a dinner on
board better than one sometimes meets with in the great
Atlantic or Pacific floating palaces. It was five in the even-
ing before we turned our head at last towards the harbour at
Kawau and saw the white front of Sir George's house at the
bottom of a deeply wooded inlet, the hills rising behind it,
the soft still sea, and the tiny islands on its skirts like patches
of forest left behind when the water had cut them off from
the land, as beautiful as eye could rest on. Fishing-boats
with red sails were floating dreamily homewards in the calm
--sails of the familiar cut of the English Channel, telling of

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