Page:Through South Westland.djvu/61

Rh by waving marsh grasses, and a river wanders through undecidedly in many streams. They told us it is the richest alluvial gold deposit on the coast, and were that plain drained and mined, gold lies in bands and pockets in fabulous measure. I was shown a coloured section of its supposed riches, that made one wonder why everyone was not digging there! Indeed, I imbibed the spirit of Ross—which is a chastened kind of gold fever—very quickly, and found myself continually scanning the ground, and peering into creeks, or picking up bits of brown stone they called “Maori stone,” and which they told us only occurred near gold.

Might not some one of those streams contain potential chances of a fortune? Indeed, many a one has been made—and lost—here. In those now far-off days, when the gold rush was at its height, men penetrated far into the ranges—by the creeks and rivers; camping sometimes together, sometimes alone, with perhaps but a rude wharé of boughs to shelter them. They dug and washed for gold in the creeks with the most primitive of outfits, amidst much toil and privation; and the solitaries came to be known as “Hatters,” the only explanation I ever got of the term being, that if they had nothing else to wash in, they washed in their hats! Further south, we came now and again on a “Hatter”—usually some old and broken man, who had taken possession of a digger’s forsaken hut, and from sheer force of