mention for the edification of my readers that this is the most southerly point of call for ocean-going steamers to New Zealand.
The Bluff is a good instance of what is at first so puzzling to a new arrival from the old country, namely, the antipodean order of things. He has been so accustomed all his life to associate cold weather, snowy hills, bleak moorlands, and wintry skies with the "inhospitable north;" and warmth, colour, foliage,and all the delights of balmy summer with the "sunny south," that he gets "considerably mixed," as a Yankee would say, to find that in New Zealand the farther south he goes he gets the less sun; and if he happens to experience the same weather as we did at the Bluff, he will begin to think that he has taken farewell of the sun altogether.
Now it does seem like a confession of weakness and want of straw, so to speak, to begin a chapter by a disquisition on the weather, and yet the elements cannot be left out in any description of the Bluff.
If there is any other place at the Antipodes where more piercing blasts are to be experienced, accompanied by gusts of sleet and rain; if there is anywhere else in the wide world, a more unsheltered, forsaken, "waste-howling wilderness" than the Bluff, well, I don't want to see it; that's all. The Bluff is quite enough for me! I saw it in somewhat similar circumstances twenty years ago, and it does not seem to have altered much since then. There are possibly a few more
