CHAPTER VIII.
COACHING THROUGH THE NORTH ISLAND OF NEW ZEALAND; ITS HOT LAKES AND GEYSERS.
Sunday, September 21st. Auckland.—-The day following our landing was a clear, spring morning, for summer is coming to these parts of the world, and we were completely charmed by the view of Auckland from the top of Princes Street, where we were staying. The harbour still and blue lay before us, looking like an inland lake from the law, flat hills that run out into the sea and nearly surround it. It is dotted with islands, the chief of which is Kawau, Sir George Grey's island home, and Rangitoto, with its three volcanic cone-like peaks. From the hill on which we were standing there was one mass of foliage stretching down to the edge of the harbour, and the houses seemed to have been put down promiscuously in the midst, forming white dots from among the surrounding green. The town and wharves lay hidden under the long, sloping hill, on the shoulder of which stands the fine stone building of the Northern Club, with its broad terraces, commanding the view seawards. A little higher up, nearly at the top of Princes Street, is Government House, only tenanted for a few weeks in summer since the removal of the capital.
The houses at Auckland are so pretty—all built of wood, all low, and two storeyed, with double verandahs on each floor and not straight verandahs, upheld at regular intervals by white posts, but gracefully arched, and carved with fretwork. The wooden fences to the gardens and the houses are painted a dead white, which stands out in dazzling brightness from the dark foliage.
There seems to be some curious anomaly, some contending element in the vegetation of New Zealand. We saw semi-hardy and semi-tropical plants growing side by side, a Scotch fir by a palm, an india-rubber-tree by a laurel; but the tropical in the end predominates. There were geraniums in the hedges, camellias and azaleas blooming in the open air, orange and lemon trees, and clumps of arum or Egyptian lilies growing wild in cool and shady places. The principal trees are the eucalypti and the Norfolk Island pine, which grows nowhere better than at Auckland. It branches straightly out, with a succession of hard, prickly fingers inclining upward towards the ends, and is of a rich dark green.
The editor of the New Zealand Herald, a very ably conducted paper, found us out on our return from church, and interviewed C. In the afternoon we drove out to Remuera, one of the pretty suburbs of which Auckland has so many. Passing through the Khyber Pass, a road dug out in the rock, we came through Newmarket, its bit of untidy common giving one a sarcastic reminder of the Newmarket of the world, on to the Remuera road. From here we could see the surrounding country, flat and cultivated, with a few low hills looking peculiarly English, the race-course of Ellerslie, where spring and autumn race meetings are held, and the harbour, for wherever you go in Auckland you always have a view of that. We had a warm welcome at the pretty cottage of an uncle of my husband's, Mr. William Young, a fine old gentleman, who has been more than forty years in the colony. He had not known of our arrival, and was quite overcome with joy at seeing us for the first time.
Whilst I was sitting writing in the evening, I suddenly heard all the watch-bells of the city ringing a fire alarm, and going out on to the upper verandah, saw the lurid flames of a fire down in the town. By the vivid illumination I could distinguish the upturned faces of the crowd, and for ten minutes it burnt fiercely, reducing the little wooden house, which was fortunately detached, to a few charred beams. Fires are of frequent occurrence, and are terribly serious among this town of wooden tenements. They have alarm bells erected in wooden penthouses in the most crowded parts of the town, and the fire brigade is kept in a full state of efficiency.
Monday, September 22nd.—We drove ten miles out to Sylvia Park, a great stud farm belonging to the New Zealand Stock and Pedigree Company, and managed by Major Walmsley. The road lay through a very wild, desolate country, roughly enclosed by stone walls loosely put together from the mass of scoria and volcanic rocks, which literally strewed the ground for miles. It is supposed to be the débris thrown up from the craters of the volcanoes, and the short, sweet grass, so peculiarly fitted for the feeding of sheep, crops up between. These extinct volcanoes, with their round, flat tops, of which there are no less than thirty-nine in the immediate vicinity of Auckland, form a distinctive feature of the country.
When we arrived at our destination we found a square wooden house, surrounded by spacious paddocks with splendid pasture. I was strongly reminded of the Downs, looking round at the many miles of rolling green hills, and by the utter stillness and loneliness.
There are in all some 150 horses, not including the constant additions to the stock like the half-a-dozen foals we saw, just a fortnight old, turned out into a paddock with their mothers. The horses are chiefly thoroughbred, and they have some blood relations to celebrated winners of the turf. At their annual sale last year at Melbourne they realized an average price of 300l. We saw their celebrated mare Sylvia, twenty-one years old, from whom the farm is named, and whose offspring are numerous and well known in racing annals; as are those also of Martini-Henry, the winner of both the Derby and Melbourne Cup, who here saw the light. Major Walmsley mentioned to us one amusing peculiarity. It has always been noticed that, on the introduction of new blood from England, the colonials separate themselves from the new-comers, and keep to the other side of the paddock.