Of this railroad—a short private line—it is said that one day, after having waited ten minutes for some of its regular passengers, "it had no sooner started than a loud whistle was heard, and a man was observed, some considerable distance back, making fast time to the station. The train very obligingly backed to the platform and waited for him, finally getting away twenty minutes late."
North of Wanganui, in Taranaki, the land of butter and cheese and iron sands, is Mount Egmont, the most beautiful volcanic cone in New Zealand. Egmont, known to the Maoris as "Taranaki," is isolated on a plain far from other mountains. It rises 8260 feet above the sea, and its cone, the culmination of long, gracefully sweeping slopes, is forest-clad to the snow-line.
The isolation of a mountain so high as Egmont is one of the most remarkable characteristics of New Zealand mountains. The ancient Maoris, who gave voice and being to mountains and to many other inanimate objects, account for this detachment in a charming way. They say that this disjunction was due to Taranaki's affectionate regard for Pihanga, an extinct volcano south of Lake Taupo. In the days when love messages were carried by wind, mists, and clouds, Taranaki stood between Tongariro and Ruapehu, seventy-five miles east of his present location. In those times mountains were gods, and they sometimes had mountains for wives. Pihanga was the wife of Tongariro, which in legendary accounts generally included Ngauruhoe.
