and sky on every side come showering down the carols of innumerable larks—Nature’s clear cry of joy. The grassy borders of the white road are green, its gorse hedges in flower. What masses of bloom! What clusters of burning orange, purest yellow, gold of unimaginable softness! The double, dark-green walls are one long blaze; the brilliance intoxicates one’s eye; and the colour! the intensity of the colour! surely it must be as much with weight of colour as of substance that the great grape-like bunches droop. Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, who fell upon his knees before the glory of the gorse in bloom upon an English common, what would Linnaeus have done here in New Zealand, at the sight of this tenfold illumination?
For miles and miles these running lines of gold tip and trim the road with light, sweeten as with a smile the snowy grandeur of the prospect beyond, and smooth the racy air with puffs of balm, rich and dreamy. Little runnels and “races” of water, led through the plain from the mountain rivers, ripple, brightly blue, here and there across the road; their flat rims of musk and clover, flowerless as yet, are lushly green. A field of oats, running and shimmering in sheets of emerald before the sunlit breeze, laughs through the grey bars of yonder gate; from the paddocks on either side comes up the cry of lambs; and look through those trees a little off the road! Can you not catch light glimpses and twinklings, past the dark soberness of pine and macrocarpa, of a green more gay and lively, and a dapple of pink-and-white?
“It must be an orchard. There must be a homestead there?”
