eams--who shall count them? Between the mouths of the Mokau and
Patea rivers--a distance which cannot be much more than one hundred
miles of coast--no less than eighty-five streams empty themselves into
the Tasman Sea, of which some sixty have their source on the slopes
or in the chasms of Mount Egmont. Quite as many more flow down from
Egmont on the inland side, and do not reach the sea separately, but
are tributaries of two or three larger rivers.

It is true that travellers may come to the Islands and leave them with
no notion of a New Zealand river, except a raging mountain torrent,
hostile to man and beast. Or they may be jolted over this same torrent
when, shrunk and dwindled in summer heat to a mere glittering thread,
it meanders lost and bewildered about a glaring bed of hot stones. But
then railways and ordinary lines of communication are chiefly along
the coasts. The unadventurous or hurried traveller sticks pretty
closely to these. It happens that the rivers, almost without
exception, show plainer features as they near the sea.

He who wishes to see their best must go inland and find them as they
are still to be found in the North Island, winding through untouched
valleys, under softly-draped cliffs, or shadowed by forests not yet
marred by man. Or, in the South Island, they should be watched in the
Alps as, milky or green-tinted, their ice-cold currents race through
the gorges.

[Illustration: ON A RIVER--"PAPA" COUNTRY

Photo by A. MARTIN, Wanganui.]

Of forest rivers, the Wanganui is the longest and most famous, perhaps
the most beautiful. Near the sea it is simply a broad river, traversed
by boats and small steamers, and with grassy banks dotted with weeping
willows or clothed with flax and the palm-lily. But as you ascend it
the hills close in. Their sides become tall cliffs, whose feet the
water washes. From the tops of these precipices the forest, growing
denser and richer at every turn, rises on the flanks of the hills. In
places the cliffs are so steep and impracticable that the Maoris use
ladders for descending on their villages above to their canoes in the
rivers below. Lovely indeed are these cliffs; first, because of the
profusion of fern frond, leaf, and moss, growing from everything that
can climb to, lay hold of, or root itself in crack, crevice, or ledge,
and droop, glistening with spray-drops, or wave whispering in the
wind; next, because of the striking form and colour of the cliffs
t