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siveness was necessarily soon abandoned, and the first ideas of the projectors may have been imperfectly realised in other respects, but it is only just to acknowledge the debt of gratitude that Canterbury owes to its founders, as even the measure of success that crowned their efforts is appreciable in the tone and spirit of its people at the present time.

The first party of emigrants, numbering 791, left England on September 7th, 1850, in four ships, and arrived at the port, now called Lyttelton, almost together, in December of the same year. Mr. Godley, the agent of the Association, was already in New Zealand, and considerable preparations had been made at the Port for the immigrants’ reception. When the Canterbury Pilgrims (as they were called) first viewed their new country from the summit of the volcanic hills that skirt the seaboard, they saw before them a bare expanse of plains, stretching from thirty to sixty miles to the foot of the dividing ranges (the backbone of the country), broken only by a few patches of timber, and with no other sign of civilization than the solitary homestead of the Messrs. Deans, who had settled there some years before. The only approach to the level land was over the mountains, about 1200 feet in height, or round by sea to Sumner, and thence by the Heathcote River to Christchurch, as the chief town was named. Those who can look back from the Canterbury of to-day to the time when they commenced to spread over the country, to bring their new land under the plough and spade, must feel astonishment as well as pride at the really wonderful results that little more than thirty years have produced. Looking over the Plains now from the Port hills, the eye is delighted with the beautiful panorama spread out before it. The whole face of nature has been changed. In place of the once bare Plains, with nothing to mark the distance or break the