Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/375

Rh  tide logs lay half buried, and when the tide was setting in there was visible the singular spectacle of logs floating up stream from twenty-five to fifty miles above the river's mouth.

Voyaging on the Wairoa was pleasantly informal. No dressy crowd met the steamer when it glided alongside a wharf, but just everyday, work-a-day people. And as for those who caught and made fast the steamer's ropes, they were voluntary wharf-hands or wharf-hands by the captain's request; and sometimes they were obliging officers or deck-hands of lumber carriers, which for a few minutes were used as a connecting link with the wharf beyond. In these ports the traveler is always welcome, and if he arrives in the late summer, as I did, or in the autumn, he is welcomed with music, not, however, with the outbursts of town bands. In this case the musicians are crickets. In North Auckland the cricket thrives wonderfully, both on the hearth, or as near as he can get to it, and on the road. Everywhere his cheerful temperament expresses itself in song, now in jubilant solo, again in one grand chorus. Nevertheless, the cricket's chirping performances are not appreciated. Even while filling the earth with melody he has been called hard names; and among other dire visitations threatening him are poisoning and death by turkey's bill. Yet the cricket is one of the oldest settlers in the country. At least forty years ago he arrived as a