CHAPTER I.
THE LONG WHITE CLOUD[1] [Footnote 1: Ao-Tea-Roa, the Maori name of New Zealand.] "If to her share some female errors fall, Look on her face--and you'll forget them all." Though one of the parts of the earth best fitted for man, New Zealand was probably about the last of such lands occupied by the human race.
The first European to find it was a Dutch sea-captain who was looking for something else, and who thought it a part of South America, from which it is sundered by five thousand miles of ocean.

It takes its name from a province of Holland to which it does not bear the remotest likeness, and is usually regarded as the antipodes of England, but is not.

Taken possession of by an English navigator, whose action, at first adopted, was afterwards reversed by his country's rulers, it was only annexed at length by the English Government which did not want it, to keep it from the French who did.

The Colony's capital bears the name of a famous British commander, whose sole connection with the country was a flat refusal to aid in adding it to the Empire.

Those who settled it meant it to be a theatre for the Wakefield Land System.