Similar scenes occurred on the following day, the same cheerful, friendly, British crowd assembling in the streets and blocking the wide Latimer Square, where the Prince received a number of formal addresses, inspected a fine body of boy-scouts, and was serenaded, first in Welsh, and afterwards in Gaelic, by groups of nice-looking girls in the quaintness of chimney-pot hats and kilts. Proceeding afterwards to Hagley park, the Prince reviewed some four thousand territorials, and shook hands with two thousand returned men. Later in the evening he held an informal levée at the civic hall, where he shook hands with another two thousand people. By this time, if there is a scientific way of accomplishing the gesture of friendship, His Royal Highness had probably learned it.
Christchurch is the third biggest city of New Zealand. A larger proportion of the inhabitants is said to be of English extraction than in any other city of the world outside the British islands. Certainly it is one of the most home-like places we saw upon the tour with its well-paved, well-lighted streets, fine business quarter, and pleasant residential suburbs full of comfortable houses, each standing in its own grounds. In Christchurch clear water courses down the gutter on one side of many of the streets. This is from subterranean springs, tapped by artesian borings, by means of which the entire city is supplied. The water is supposed to be derived from the snows of the southern New Zealand Alps as they soak into the valley of the Waimakariri--"freezing water"--river which flows into the Canterbury plain.
A fine harbour, with water so deep that even the _Renown_ was able to lie alongside the wharf, exists eight miles off, at Lyttleton. Until one goes over the ground it seems strange that a large city should have been built so far away as eight miles from the harbour connected with it. The lie of the hills explains this however. The harbour of Lyttleton is so hedged in by steep slopes that it has been considered impossible to build a city around it, and Christchurch occupies the nearest level ground across the range. Connexion is facilitated by a mile-long railway tunnel, one of the oldest undertakings of its kind in New Zealand.