threshed out ninety-seven bushels of oats to the acre. The thick second growth of self-sown crop showed that the yield must have been considerably over a hundredfold.
All along this coast, right up to Taranaki, there exists a curious chain of lakes, running parallel with the sea, at a distance of a few miles inland. To the seaward side of these lakes, the country is sandy, light, and not particularly fertile. But between the lakes and the hill ranges, the soil is magnificent. A rich black loam that can grow anything. Only a very narrow strip of country, comparatively speaking, is as yet settled here. All the back-wooded country, the hilly valleys and ranges, are still unoccupied. Room here for thousands of colonists. The roads are in good order. They are under the supervision of county boards, who levy a rate of three farthings per pound on the acreage value. They take the Government valuation for the property tax, as the basis of their assessment. The limit under the property tax is one penny per pound.
Farming here is in a healthy state. It was a genuine pleasure to me to see the trim hedges, the cleared-out ditches, the long clean expanse of well-tilled fields, unmarred by a single unsightly stump or fallen log. In one field we saw the farmer and his men cleaning out an empty dam, and spreading the silt as a top dressing on a bit of poor land. Grazing is, however, the chief industry, and most of the splendidly-grassed paddocks were not so many years ago waving high with the ubiquitous
