which now to realize would require a visit to some primeval virgin forest of New Zealand.
It was no easy task to penetrate the shades which these pristine tenants threw over the solid earth, for here, there, and everywhere, entwined and entangled, were supplejacks and lawyers, barring all progress, without the assistance of a tomahawk or by paying the penalty of leaving a piece of raiment or skin as a forfeit. "How far have you got to-day?" was wont to be a question. "Nearly a mile," was the satisfactory reply; and he was a very good bushman who in those days would blaze a track of one mile in eight hours.
Underneath this dense and ponderous foliage there were other vegetable products, lower in the scale, but amply repaying any labour, inconvenience, or suffering needful to learn their history. First lay prone some of the forest monarchs whose heads aspired during their lifetime far above their fellows. Totara, red, black, and white pines, had in their dotage sought the shelter of mother earth, and now their trunks, dead enough in themselves, are clothed with a new life, a wonderful vegetable existence, living in shadow, dying in light. And as attendant mourners over their departed greatness, shrubs small in stature but striking in their growth, foliage or blossom, combining with the tree ferns in all their characteristic elegance, cast a feeling over the mind of the reflective beholder, that while death is a pervading element, other life follows close or accompanies it.
In those wooded dells, along whose depths the burnie flowed, gathering volume and strength from each rill which trickled down the hillsides at frequent intervals, and particularly lurking in and about some rocky crannie, on the margins of these streams, a world of wondrous variety of ferns, lycopods, and mosses were to be obtained, which amply repaid any toil or difficulty in securing them. Perhaps no space in New Zealand of equal size contained such a profusion of vegetable products, from the stateliest timber tree, always excepting the giant kauri, down through all the grades to the minute filmy fern and moss, as did that contained within the site of Dunedin and its immediate vicinity.
The denizens of the forest were not numerous. The wild pig, an intruder, was the only animal of value, and early
