LOOKING-GLASS LAND.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LI, Issue 5599, 4 February 1879, Page 7

LOOKING-GLASS LAND.

A Chicagoan, says an American contemporary, who has recently returned from Australia and New Zealand, says of the latter country:—“New Zealand is a wonderland. As you sail towards it there rises before you a black, and to all appearances unbroken, wall of stone. It is a volcanic island, and the coast is very rough and dangerous. Yet Auckland has the most beautiful harbour my eyes ever rested upon. The vegetation is very strange and beautiful. I have seen fern trees twenty and twenty-five feet high, with magnificent fronds. The fern growth is marvellously luxuriant. There are about 150 varieties, and some of them the oddest shapes imaginable. One kind, with a very delicate lavender leaf, is singularly handsome. There seems .‘to be no bottom to the soil, either of the island or the continent. 1 have seen soil —black muck soil—twenty feet deep, and they told me that up the country were many immense downs where twenty-five feet were the average. It is impossible to over-calculate the productive capacity of such ground as that. The great drawback to agriculture is the recurrence of a yearly drought. They are beginning to overcome this by means of artesian wells and the diversion of watercourses. It is a strange, and in some respects, a weird land. The gum trees give a queer and creepy aspect to every wood scene. Their limbs are gnarled and twisted in a way you cannot disassociate from an idea of pain; their foliage is scant, and the white bark stares through it like bare arms. The birds are nearly all songless, though they have the most brilliant plumage. Most of them are quiet all day, but as soon as night falls the Woods are ringing with their harsh, discordant dries. In fact, the continent is in many respects what you might call a looking-glass Country—for everything seems to be reversed in it. The north is warm, the south is cold ; day is quiet, and night is full of life; the vegetation smallest here is largest there, and they have a bird without wings, and fourfooted animals with beaks. But the humans are right-end up and wide-awake, and unless I’m much mistaken they will make a country of it that the world will stand amazed at. The foregoing seems rather mixed. The writer has evidently travelled in both Australia and New Zealand, and has confused the distinctive features of both in a very extraordinary manner.