Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/271

Rh fringe known as the Town Belt, divided by sinuous Queen's Drive, a name that suggested what it did not signify—a broad and well-paved driveway. On each side of this drive were many delightful bowers. There, clustering thickly together, were fuschia and other low growth, canopied and weighted heavily with clematis, lawyer, and other creepers; and there the manuka, white with scentless blossoms, exhaled its strong aroma of leaf and limb. On Maori Hill were revealed the lake-like city reservoir and the shady retreats of Ross Creek, its chief feeder. Below Maori Hill meandered the Valley of the Leith, a charming dale running toward Mount Cargill between leaf-screened cliffs.

West of Flagstaff ran the gorge of the Taieri River, and in the distance, over hill and vale, rose the Lammerlaws, the Rock and Pillar Range, and, dimly outlined, Mount Ida and Mount St. Bathans, overlooking the Central Otago goldfields.

Southward stretched the hedge-bordered paddocks of Taieri Plain, which with its varied colors produced by cut and uncut grain, and hayfields and groves of trees, looked like a crazy quilt. On the eastern side of this plain is the largest glacial drift in New Zealand. Forming a range of hills more than twenty-five miles long, it is from a half-mile to three miles wide and about a thousand feet deep.

In all this panorama nothing is so fascinating as the wild seacoast. In front of Dunedin and for miles to its