Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/205

 At Bryant's, Kitty Gregg, the guide, was pointed out to us. She is renowned through all the lake country as a daring and accomplished horsewoman. Can handle an oar like a Beach, and an axe in a style that would make Gladstone envious. Bred and reared amid these rocky pastures and wild solitudes, she knows every foot of the country, and is as free, fearless, and independent as the winds that whistle round Mount Earnslaw. Woe betide the "rash intruding fool," who in his self-sufficiency would presume on Kitty's sex to give himself airs, or attempt any familiarity. We heard of one case where she left a coxcomb to find his way home by himself, and he getting lost in the mountains was glad humbly to sue for pardon, and accept Kitty's guidance into safety after she had thoroughly frightened him by a temporary desertion. Kitty is evidently a lake institution, and much respected by all the dwellers round about.

I am not sure but that the mountains at the top of the lake are not even in some respects more remarkable than "The Remarkables" themselves."

They all rise at the same angle from the valley. Their ridgy backs all point in the same direction, and each terminates in a cliffy point very similar in shape. Each is a counterpart of the other, and are all clad in the same livery of black spots and streaks and silver scales. I could not help the fancy being engendered that they were a school of gigantic dolphins suddenly frozen into ice, as by the fiat of some dev or djinn, as they were taking a ten-thousand-foot