Page:Through South Westland.djvu/322

206 happened, we should not have got back that night without him. Our guide led us along the river, first by glades and open bush where the magnificent southern beeches towered up seventy and eighty feet.

There are several varieties of this noble tree, which attains in these southern forests to huge dimensions; Menzie’s beech and Solander’s beech may reach even a hundred feet. No more beautiful forest can be imagined than this beech-forest, with the long vistas down stately isles between their silvery boles, the branches spreading high overhead, covered with the small, dark green leaves no bigger than boxwood, and exceedingly feathery and graceful in shape. The settlers call them all “birch,” and merely distinguish them as “white,” “black,” or “red,” according to the wood.

At first the going was good enough, and there was but little undergrowth, and the old scars on the trunks were plain; but this did not last, and we came to boggy places and gullies, which severely tried Mephibosheth’s legs; then a tangle of slender young trees and huge rotting trunks, with here and there a fine red beech among the lesser growths. The horses broke their way through easily enough, but with no regard for their riders, and we sat ready to slip off first one side and then the other, and our feet were constantly in danger of being crushed. Thus we progressed through several