Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/119

 league. Turnip paddocks, hundred of acres in extent. Great hayricks here and there, and an occasional mansion peeping out from its plantations of fir and willow. Alas! for the sparsity of humanity. Sheep and cattle cannot equal men.

Now we leave the undulating downs and grassy ridges and enter the bush country. We pass sidings with great logs ready for the trucks. Wooden tramways lead everywhere into the dense forest. Here are magnificent wild wooded valleys and forest-clad gorges; the silence in their deep recesses only broken by the ring of the timberman's axe.

Dashing ever onward and upward, we whizz across a high spidery wooden bridge on fragile-looking trestles, spanning a deep ravine, and now reach Ormondville.

Such a township; with its acres of blackened prostrate logs, its giant trunks and stumps, the clearing fires, the rough backwoodsmen, the lumbering bullock teams, and the distant peep of the wooded hills over the ever-widening circle of seemingly impervious bush. It recalls the stories of Fenimore Cooper; and we could almost fancy ourselves away in the Indian wilds of Canada.

And so to Danevirke, a neat Danish settlement. The same prospect here. Man carving a home out of the heart of the primeval bush, and everywhere the fire completing the work begun by the axe. The sky is shrouded in gloom from the smoke. We are told this is a good burning