Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/161

 suggest cloisters, quadrangles, libraries, groups of grey professors, and throngs of grave-lipped students.

There are old ivy-covered churches, too, that seem to have been picked out of old English towns and dropped down here. Yonder is an old belfry tower, weather grey and lichen-covered. Surely it has been transported bodily from some corner of Lichfield or York.

The schools and colleges are thickly scattered over the flat beyond the river. I remember when it was a wilderness of marshy sedge tussocks and flax-bushes. Now the architectural triumphs would do credit to any cathedral city at home.

The Museum, under the able curatorship of Dr. Julius von Haast, ranks as the finest in all Australia. Indeed, the collection in some respects is not inferior to that of any European capital.

The Botanic Gardens and Park are exquisitely laid out, and set off by the silvery, ribbon-like Avon, which purls gently along, meandering through the groves and ornamental lawns.

The ocean bounds the view on one side, and far away, verging the plain, the snowy Alps fringe the picture with their glistening crests of spotless white on the other.

It is a beautiful panorama. One could easily fancy himself back in the old country. But the sights are soon exhausted, and the flatness is apt to become "just a leetle monotonous."

Warner's Commercial Hotel, in the Cathedral