o pass by.

We have three or four townships to call at, places where the Government
has set aside a certain tract of land for a future town. A township site
is cut up--on paper--into allotments, which are sold, or kept in the
Land Office until wanted. From what we see of the Kaipara towns, they
are very much in embryo as yet. Te Otamatea, for instance, is a single
house and nothing more. This is our ideal of a bush settlement; it is as
it should be--not too much humanity and crowd. The house, a rambling,
wooden building, is of a good size though, being an hotel and store.
Round it are several hundred acres of grass. Sometimes it is very
festive, for a large Maori kainga is not far off; and at Te Otamatea a
race-course has been made, where the annual races of the Kaipara
districts are held.

Altogether, we like Te Otamatea, with its beautiful situation and lovely
views, better than Port Albert. This is a sort of bloated Manchester or
Birmingham of the district. No less than six or seven houses are
visible close together. If you count barns and byres, and such more
distant houses as are visible from the steamer's deck, there must be
over a dozen. It is horridly populous. Moreover, one sees here, so
strongly marked, that uncouth rawness that attends incipient
civilization. Nature has been cleared away to make room for the art of
man, and art has not yet got beyond the inchoate unloveliness of bare
utilitarianism. The beautiful woods have given place to a charred,
stumpy, muddy waste, on which stand the gaunt, new frame-houses.
Gardens, orchards, cornfields, and meadows are things to come; until
they do the natural beauty of the place is killed and insulted. But what
have we to do with sentimental rubbish? This is Progress! Bless it!

Of course we did not expect to get to our destination all in a minute,
for Te Pahi is more than forty miles from Helensville, in a straight
line. We started about five o'clock in the morning, but it is late in
the day before we get into the Arapaoa. By taking advantage of the
tides, the _Lily_ manages to accomplish ten knots an hour. But the going
in and out of different rivers, though we do not go far up any of them,
and the various stoppages, short though they be, make it late in the
afternoon before we sight Te Pahi.

We are coming up the broad Arapaoa, and before us we suddenly see Te
Pahi, a vision of loveliness, "our" township, as we are already calling
it. A high, wooded bluff, the