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Chapter XXIII.
THE CANTERBURY PLAINS.
“Wide downs, wide sky, a faint harmonious hum
Of wings invisible that beat upon
The ether; blue hills that kneel in orison
Above the founts from which long rivers come.
Peace that might presage the millenium,
O’er all a sun that never brighter shone
Since first Creation’s Noon flowered from the Dawn
And Earth forgot her long years dark and dumb.”
The Dunedin express left Christchurch at 11.50, arriving at the Southern city at 9.15 p.m. The country as far as Timaru was very flat, bounded by the Southern Alps far away on the right and by the sea on the left of the line. Such splendid fields of grain there were, hedged with gorse or hawthorn, mile after mile of them, with plantations of pinus insignis like dark green islands in a sea of verdure, and surrounding some of the houses near the railway were sycamores, limes, poplars, elms, and oaks. And numerous rivers, numberless streams,—no wonder that the isles of New Zealand are emerald with such abundance of water everywhere and such a temperate climate.
Timaru is a charming little watering place with a great future before it. It has a long sandy beach on one side of the breakwater and wharves and a long
