Page:Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand.djvu/178

138 however, be easily overcome, by the construction of zig-zag sidelings—provided always that this is the route which the engineers would select. Having ascended the spur we follow a narrow table-land till we reach a sideling on the shady side of the range. The sideling becomes steeper and softer, and we became weary and wet, but we are gratified by occasional glimpses of the wide expanse of Manuka Flat—once a grand old lake—and of the row of ranges which form a magnificent outline on its eastern side. We are scarcely less gratified by hearing the barking of a quadruped, whose voice my friend Young William recognises as that of ‘Davie’s dog,’ and in a few minutes we are made grateful by a hospitable invitation from Davie himself and from his mate, Tom Blair, who pipe a duet from their hut, some distance below, in the welcome words ‘Come down and have something to eat.’ Tom and Davie are the representatives of the holders of claim No. 2 South, and they had just finished the clearing of the ground, the construction of their hut, and the driving of the first few feet of their tunnel.

“We eat. And on this subject let me say something. Mutton, preceded by potato soup and followed by tea and a few whiffs of twist, is, no doubt, delectable diet. But every rose has its thorn. And the metaphorical thorn in this case is the consideration that all this ‘tucker’ has to be borne on the backs of men along the track over which we had just succeeded, with difficulty, in dragging our poor bodies, more in the condition of a mass of perspiring pulp than in the proper semblance of the noble human frame. For the two days I was on the ground, I was the recipient of the hospitality of the prospectors, and owe them an apology for the shocking appetite which I exhibited. Like Macbeth, when the words of prayer hung upon his lips, I should have been conscience-stricken, and apostrophising a potato, have ordered it to stick in my throat rather than be swallowed after the sweat of other brows. However, they owe your correspondent an apology also for encouraging him to drink so much tea at unseasonable hours, thereby disturbing his natural rest, and leading him into flights of imagination, the very mildest of which was, that he was Aladdin, and that their tunnel was the golden cave. But, seriously, if visitors to the reefs become numerous, they should also, from the considerations which I have mentioned, become their own providores.”

The metaphorical mantle of honour and responsibility which Master Willy Sloan had so manfully worn as the correspondent’s guide to the reefs, was next day transferred to the more aged shoulders of Albert, the Swiss, who became his courteous cicerone, and one of his hospitable hosts for the following twenty-four hours. Albert was an old acquaintance, and a year before had been encountered as an enthusiastic exponent of the attributes of the Lyell, in regard to the formation of “specimen gold,” and as a prophet of the now proved fact that a rich reef would some day be discovered there. Albert and he went thoroughly over the ground, picking and shovelingshovelling [sic] surface quartz, and into tunnels, sniffing their strong sulphury atmosphere, and ogling the stone where gold and mundic were visible. The observations then made by the correspondent in detail need not be here published, nor will I ask my readers at this date to follow him through the prospectors’ claim, or the claims then known as Nos. 1 and 2 South and North, as the