Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/201

 the Scotch engineer, waxes enthusiastic, too, as I expatiate, with what eloquence I can command, on the glorious scenery around us.

"Aye, man, it's juist graund," he says; "it only wants some big gentleman's hoose, and beech nuts and hazel nuts, and a gamekeeper to chase ye, to be like hame."

Luckily there are no gamekeepers here, though to be sure there is a close season for the trout. One magnificent trout, weighing upward of 30 Ibs., was caught in the lake recently, and we feasted on a boiled trout on board which had been dried and smoked by the cook, and was as big as a good-sized salmon. (The trout, of course, not the cook.)

We are now reaching the far end of the lake. The hillsides are here heavily wooded, and have a softer aspect than the terrible bare desolation which marks the rugged seams and iron ridgy bars of "The Remarkables." As we look back, too, the three islands form a pretty foreground, and the pitying mists 'drape the bare rocks, softening their rugged outlines, till the scene looks like a summer pass in the Trossachs. As ever and anon the veil is lifted, however, the great height of the towering mountains, here some 8000 to 9000 feet of sheer acclivity, burns in upon the brain. The snowy peaks rise abrupt, sheer, straight up, up, up, like a pyre of white flame. It looks as if earth were blazing up her very mountain tops in sublimated essence "as a wave-offering before the Lord." How can I describe the wondrous sight?