It Is Tedious Work Keeping Constant Company With The Bullocks; They Travel So Slowly.

Let us linger behind and sun ourselves upon a tussock or a flax bush, and let them travel on until we catch them up again.

They are now going down into an old river-bed formerly tenanted by the Waimakiriri, which then flowed into Lake Ellesmere, ten or a dozen miles south of Christ Church, and which now enters the sea at Kaiapoi, twelve miles north of it; besides this old channel, it has others which it has discarded with fickle caprice for the one in which it happens to be flowing at present, and which there appears some reason for thinking it is soon going to tire of. If it eats about a hundred yards more of its gravelly bank in one place, the river will find an old bed several feet lower than its present; this bed will conduct it into Christ Church. Government had put up a wooden defence, at a cost of something like 2000 pounds, but there was no getting any firm starting-ground, and a few freshes carried embankment, piles, and all away, and ate a large slice off the bank into the bargain; there is nothing for it but to let the river have its own way. Every fresh changes every ford, and to a certain extent alters every channel; after any fresh the river may shift its course directly on to the opposite side of its bed, and leave Christ Church in undisturbed security for centuries; or, again, any fresh may render such a shift in the highest degree improbable, and sooner or later seal the fate of our metropolis. At present no one troubles his head much about it, although a few years ago there was a regular panic upon the subject.

These old river channels, or at any rate channels where portions of the rivers have at one time come down, are everywhere about the plains, but the nearer you get to a river the more you see of them; on either side the Rakaia, after it has got clear of the gorge, you find channel after channel, now completely grassed over for some miles, betraying the action of river water as plainly as possible. The rivers after leaving their several gorges lie, as it were, on the highest part of a huge fanlike delta, which radiates from the gorge down to the sea; the plains are almost entirely, for many miles on either side the rivers, composed of nothing but stones, all betraying the action of water. These stones are so closely packed, that at times one wonders how the tussocks and fine, sweet undergrowth can force their way up through them, and even where the ground is free from stones at the surface I am sure that at a little distance below stones would be found packed in the same way. One cannot take one's horse out of a walk in many parts of the plains when off the track - I mean, one cannot without doing violence to old-world notions concerning horses' feet.

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