ever-varying groups of labouring convicts, burrowing at the face of the cliffy banks, levelling the mounds, and filling up the hollows like so many Gargantuan ants. The elegant spire of St. Peter's English church; the high scaffolding of St. John's Scotch church, rising like the Phoenix from its ashes of two years ago; the Catholic church of St. Joseph's; the Catholic cathedral of St. Mary's; the dainty spire and turrets of St. Andrew's Scotch church, boasting the prettiest interior of any church in the colonies. All these, and others, look down on the busy town below, and point one's thoughts upward to the purer realms, where the tricks of trade and the sordid pursuits of earth find no abiding place.
Wellington owes much to its Harbour Board. Geographically speaking, it occupies a most important position, and must always be a shipping centre, as it commands trade routes to every coast of both North and South islands. The railways, too, are being pushed vigorously forward, and all the wealth of the Wairarapa Valley, and the rich lands to the north along the Manawatu railway now in course of construction, must inevitably find their entrepôt in Wellington.
From the harbour one gets but a cramped idea of the extent of the town. One sees nothing of the dense array of houses which fill the Te Aro Valley, which stretch in long streets away for some miles towards Island Bay, and which huddle together in the narrow valleys up behind the first terrace on the backward hills.
