Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/232

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Our New Zealand Cousins.

among the old workings. They have to go deep now for wash dirt, but get coarse gold, very red and water-worn, among the pebbles and drift. They are a more hang-dog set of oblique-looking pagans than one generally sees in New South Wales. Many of them look as if they had been in the wars.

Cultivation extends to the very tops of the ridges here. Great armies of gulls follow the shining ploughshare as it turns up the teeming tilth. And I am glad to observe pleasing evidences round every homestead that the tree-planting fever has been pretty generally infectious.

It does one's heart good, after the slovenly farming and tree-stumps of some parts of Australia, to see the clean fields here. The ploughmen of this part of Otago are famous, and the mathematical exactitude of the long, clean furrows would rejoice the heart of a true farmer anywhere. The train is full of volunteers going up to Dunedin for the review and sham-fight on the Queen's Birthday, and the run from Milton Junction is past Lake Waihoa, Mossgiel, &c., a part of the country which I have already described.

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Having now got back to the Otago capital, we find time to look about us, and very soon the conviction is forced upon us that, from an architectural point of view, Dunedin is the finest city of the whole colony. The inequalities of her surface lines undoubtedly aid in producing a fine effect; but the genius of her architects, the taste and