mountainous country, with a precipitous, rugged coast. This country is as yet exclusively in the hands of natives, if we except the two widely-separated hamlets at Tologa Bay and Waiapu. There is no farming. The settlers subsist by their trade, and barter with the natives. The Maoris themselves cultivate—chiefly maize and potatoes, and a very little wheat at times. This they thresh out in primitive style by the aid of their horses' hoofs. Native wheat in New Zealand can be known, as native indigo is, in India—by the dirt in the samples.
There is a large amount of fine forest-land and many rich fertile valleys inland waiting exploitation, but the coast is very barren. There is a proposal before the speculative public now to form a great popular syndicate and acquire this tract of country by purchase, and then settle it on a communistic plan. Here's a chance for the disciples of Henry George. I would like to see it tried.
Turning round Gable End Foreland, a sheer abrupt rocky face like the gable of a mighty house, a formation, as one can see by the detached fragments and hummocks in the sea at its base, evidently the result of some tremendous landslip, we enter Poverty Bay, in the mid circumference of which nestles the neat and thriving little town of Gisborne.
The roadstead is exposed to south-east gales, and a poor stranded barque, lying battered and broken on the strand, with the exultant waves hungrily licking her riven ribs, proved conclusively
