Introductory.
ICTURESQUE DUNEDIN! Even in this land of the picturesque the fair city of Dunedin may well claim the title. Few cities are more richly endowed with beauty in their natural surroundings. Whether it be viewed from the heights above the town, whence the scene embraces a wide panorama of partially wooded hills of pleasingly diversified contour encircling the land-locked bay, whose blue waters lave its wharves, or from the opposite shore of the harbour, whence are seen the varied buildings closely packed on the lower ground, with the white houses straggling up the hill sides amid embowering trees, it equally charms the eye, and forms a picture of the rarest beauty. Close though the hills stand to the town, and its lake-like harbour, no oppressive sense of seclusion is awakened in the mind of the spectator, for away to the southward the wide breach in their circling ramparts affords a prospect over the heaving waters of the mighty Pacific. Fair though the surroundings of Dunedin be, and always must be, they owe little of their beauty to the hand of man, who has rather hitherto played the part of a destroyer. Five and twenty years ago the hills surrounding the harbour were densely clothed from their summits to the water's edge, by an almost unbroken forest, which has largely disappeared before the axe of the hardy settler. Yet, while the bay has thus necessarily lost beauties which can never be restored, it has gained others from the green pastures and smiling homesteads with which these hills are now studded. The situation of Dunedin is so romantically picturesque, that each of its inhabitants might well bestow upon it the endearing epithet which the residents of the Dunedin of the northern hemisphere never tire of quoting, and call it
"Mine Own Romantic Town."
Yet, though this new Edinburgh is rich in natural attractions, it has as yet none of the romance which adds such a charm to
