Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/74

 New York Although lake trout are caught in great quantities here, it is against the law to sell them. We saw a man come in today with as many rainbow trout as he and two boys could carry. Lake trout are not particularly good fish. Brook trout are possibly the best fish in the world, but the lake trout are larger, and coarser; we have seen them here weighing twenty-two pounds, but the average is nearer three pounds. In one pool at Rotorua, thousands of trout may be seen swimming around, and children feed them with bread crumbs Some of the grazing land in New Zealand, after it has been cleared, manured, and seeded to grass, becomes very valuable. It is worth as high as $400 an acre. Choice land is worth an equal amount in Australia, but in both Australia and New Zealand there is plenty of land that may be had for almost nothing; but it is worth no more than is charged for it It is generally believed that the original New-Zealanders, the original Hawaiians, and the people living in the islands between, came from the same general stock. The language was evidently the same at one time, and has been corrupted into dialects. The native New-Zealanders are exactly like our American Indians, in appearance; perhaps they are all of the same original stock. The people of Samoa look like the Hawaiians, the Mexicans and the Indians; and the people of the South Sea islands were such adventurous navigators that the Samoan group is also known as the Navigator Islands, and probably many centuries ago the islands extended much nearer to the mainland of North America than at present. The surface of the earth is constantly changing; where lofty