a change, and with very few homesteads. And after we left Lumsden, at about three o’clock, we seemed to be getting to the back of beyond. The hills were coming nearer and nearer,—for they came to us, we did not go to them,—until at last we were passing through a natural gateway looming big and brown above the train, and on the other side of it we found ourselves in a huge basin of barren, tussocky hillocks. It was intensely hot, and the train dragged wearily, stopping continually at tiny stations or sidings, though we could discover no excuse for these delays.
And then quite suddenly there was a glint of blue water ahead; a few minutes later we had run into Kingston, which is nothing but a slender collection of cottages clustered round a station, and soon we were on the launch, about to cross the lake to Queenstown.
That crossing took two hours and a half, though it is only twenty-five miles, and by the time we arrived we were very tired of it, for the sun, so hot and fierce all day, was beginning to decline when we left the train at five o’clock, and as the mountains kept it from the lake the voyage over was both cold and somewhat dreary. The tall bronze walls that hold the Kingston end of Wakatipu looked a dull, unburnished copper that afternoon; its sides were devoid of trees and even of scrub, just bare, rocky heights of varying shapes frowning down on the little lonely boat.
“Are these the Remarkables?” asked Mrs Greendays with infinite scorn in her voice. “For what are they remarkable? Their lack of distinction, I suppose!”
But we had not yet arrived in sight of that great chain, and it was not until the following morning that we recognised it.
It seemed a very long while before we rounded the curve that gave us the first glimpse of Queenstown, and that was disappointing for it seemed such a tiny hamlet, not a bit like the photographs. And Mrs Greendays, fast getting into a state of “nerves,” was loud in her denunciations of the deceptions practised by the guide-books, that “always exaggerated the wonder and beauty of everything so that one was continually disappointed.”
But almost before she had exhausted her caustic comments they were thrust back upon her, contradicted triumphantly by the evidence of her own eyes. The launch had rapidly gained upon the shore until Queenstown lay immediately in front of us, sloping down to the very edge of the lake and away up in the curve of the hills that encircled it like the interlaced arms of a mighty chair, and no photographs or pictures that we had seen did justice to the reality. The sun was not shut out from Queenstown; the hills were not gaunt and grim and grey, but green and smiling, the houses white, the waters of the lake a lovely blue, and behind it all, reaching to the sky, there were dark, frowning peaks that accentuated the gracious scene they so jealously guarded.
And though it was nearly nine before we had “arranged ourselves” and had some badly-needed food, the sun still lingered somewhere in the West, bestowing
