The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-12-09

I EA EdANCAAEGs hAAAAC AAEEAAE RlAAANEG fills his pockets with specimens that will pay for his weeks beer. The 1 new chum' who hears these stories true enough in certain instances; fam cies he has landed in a Tom Tiddler's l ground. where gold and silver may be 1 picked up, and is often tempted to pro- vide himself with spade and start for the digings. But before doing so i he had better engage in a still hunt for an experienced digger.
 They are not hard to find, even in the neighbOrhoOd of Auckland. At a place called Henderson the writer came across a gum camp run by a man call ed The Don." Of Spanish or Mexi- can origin. he was an old colonial. own- ed few hundred barren acres and liv- ed in little shanty with tin roof, where he kept a store of provisions and a few sacks of kauri. In the grassy paddock stood a dozen can- vas shelters, half tent. half shack, with low walls and chimney built of adobe. Plenty of room for a man and his mate to make themselves snug he said, ''and only a bob (25 cents), a week to pay for rent"
 Beyond the paddock fence lay the fields" rough, rolling moorland, bare or covered with manuka low, healthy plant that opens its white blossoms at l Christmas-tide. In a sheltered hollow by muddy stream grew tree ferns and a cabbage tree, a queer palm that branched and bore at the end of each limb a moplike head of leaves. The 1 flash of spade in the sunlight drew me to a digger at work.
 l He was a middle aged man, with a pale, drawn face, who had just got over an attack of liver complaint, and had joined the camp in order to get work out of doors Asked what surface indications there were to go by, he re- piled that there were practically none, except little pits and Impressions where Jumps might have lodged. He just made his tucker" by his work, and had to buy his provisions and sell his find at the camp store. This was con- ducted somewhat on the truck sys- tenn.
 i Later I met a digger working ''on his own," thin tattered youth picking l o"Sbg at 1AS tpASiB 4VIuNkehllI CtAA NAAs <A Sydney ''broke,'' driven to New Zea- land by hard times, he had failed to find job in town, so be bought a spade and, with an old sail for shelter and a tin billy" to boil his tea, had camped on piece. of wasteland. Ir his cheerful struggle to wiring an hon. est living out of the soil, the poor fel- 1 low reminded me of Wordsworth's 'leech gatherer on the lonely moor All he had to show for his days toi i was about 25 cents worth of gum.
 Such instances as the above repres. ent gum digging at it's lowest ebb the facile figures of the enthusiast whose "reminiscences run to the tune oi sixty pound nuggets of clear gum ant royal sprees. But both the convales' cent and the Sydney man were work. l ing near the city in a. district where the, frequent shallow graves ant erusts of dry, upturned clay show tha' the ground has been we'll probed ant picked over in the past. The frs corners naturally skinned the surface deposits, and many of them stocked l farms or built hotels with the pro ceeds. As an ex-dfgger, now com fortably settled in an exporting office remarked: "A man must dig deel now, go far afield and work as hart a railroad navvy to make anything a gum digging"
 i The best place to look for compara l lively fresh field is in the north of tn, l Auckland provincial district. For tn, small license fee of five shillings year, the impecunious digger is priyil eged to dig anywhere on Crown lands But these are in remote situations. Flo the gum rights on land under privat ownership, which lies nearer tn steamer landings than the forest re serves, high prices are often paid. ] speculator in a case heard of bough up 50O-acres of clay land covered wit fern scrub for $9o0 and subsequentl
 sold the exclusive gum-digging right for $2,000. This was, of course, virgil soil.
 Kauri gum land is roughly classifie
 into hill and swamp. It is in the slougl pockets, in flat marsh land, whereve
 there is soft or muddy soil, that tn
 gum spear comes into play. For il
 such places great ', logs met with
 check in their downward course, be came embedded and decayed, leavin
 their precious cargo behind. There Aithen, the. digger sinks in his long point ed rod of iron. The novice, graspin a 12-foot spear flor the first time, 500
 tires of this questioning the unrespon
 sive earth. But it is a wonderful hoy
 educated the sense of becomes. | every camp there is sure to be one ma lwhose finger tips, sensitive as antenne
 have learned at first touch to distin
 guish between gum and decayed woot
 or other worthless matter. 1 The season of the year affects tn
 gum digger. In the rainy winter an
 spring he works on the hills and dr
 mors. After Christmas comes tw
 months of settled weather, and the it is that the bulk of the kauri gur
 harvest is gathered; for the swamp
 are drying out, and a man can worI without fear of sinking in a bog up t
 his neck. Now the lowIands are eas
 fer to dig than the upland clays, so
 is after Christmas that the grea
 trek" to the north sets in, and tn
 boats plying to Mongonui and Russe