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Southland Times, Volume 2, Issue 90, 15 September 1863, Page 2

The rapid way in which the town of < Invercargill has gained and is gaining upon the wilderness of bush, is surprising and pleasing. A ten minutes walk up Dee-street and the North roa-sl, enables the curious to at ©nee take in the fact of quick progression. The wide, and but for the mud, handsome street, with its innumerable shops, stores, hotels, its crowd and bustle, its noisy hummers and its "original printing office/ contrast strangely with the stillness, and Vacuum abhorrent to nature, which prevailed within the memoty of the youngest inhabitant. The traffic too tliat is carried on, the constant passage of loaded drays and waggons, where but a short time ago wandered only lean kangaroo dogs, must . appear to the early settlers as astonishing, as did the introduction of railways' to the American Indians. Tbe same change for the better is still apparent, after the town is left, and the North Road sweeps *way through the suburbs. The land once given up to Kauri-gum's and CawCaw's is now cleared, fenced, and dotted with villa residences, and rustic ale houses ; where formerly was what might have been called the flax garden of Southlaud, are now green fields, that on warm afternoons are irresistibly attractive to the lazy pedestrian, and ploughed and sown ground, full of promise for the harvest to come. On each side of the road, the timber is being rapidly felled, and soon the woodland will exist only as a landscape background to cot-ages and orchards. The tide of population is bearing away all the old solitude. Huts and habitations of every description have been erected on all sides. In almost every unfelled clump of trees is the white patch of a tent, and even when straying into the most sequestered spots, you Came upon groups of miners and sawyers squatted • round their fires. But the North Koad j and its environs are not the only places where life is beginning to swarm — south, east, and west it is the same. Clusters of houses and the nuclei of future warehouses seem to grow, mushroom-like, in a night ; and in another, they are built into the town proper. Invercargiil, for all its mud, and despite the sneers of its decriers, is indeed spreading rapidly into a large town, and soon the Board that watches over its welfare, will be fairly bewildered how to meet its vaiious necessities. As it, is, it appears to be too much for them — it has spent all ther nioney, or they have spent all its mouey, and they have only Shylock's resource left — the bond. Truly, the increasing size and population of luvercargiU seem to have a claim to wider municipal legislation, than has as yet been accorded to it.