parties cutting their way, axe in hand, through the thick bush, to
come upon skeletons of men in lonely places, still it might be taken
for granted that these were the remains of early explorers or
travellers who had got lost and starved to death within the green
tangled walls of this impenetrable forest. The scenery of that part
of the Middle Island is far more beautiful than in the agricultural
or pastoral districts. Giant Alps clothed half up their steep sides
with evergreen pines,--whose dark forms end abruptly where snow and
ice begin,--stand out against a pure sky of more than Italian blue,
and only when a cleared saddle is reached can the traveller look
down over the wooded hills and vallies rolling away inland before
him, or turn his eyes sea-ward to the bold coast with its many
rivers, whose wide mouths foam right out to where the great Pacific
waves are heaving under the bright winter sun.

Such, and yet still more fair must have been the prospect on which
Burgess, Kelly, Levy, and Sullivan's eyes rested one June morning in
the mid-winter of 1866. They were, one and all, originally London
thieves, and had been transported years before to the early penal
settlements of Australia. From thence they had managed, by fair
means and foul, to work their way to other places, and had latterly
been living in the Middle Island, earning what they could by
horse-breaking and divers odd jobs. But your true convict hates
work with a curiously deadly hatred, and these four men agreed to go
and look round them at the new West Coast diggings. They found,
however, that there, as elsewhere, it would be necessary to work
hard, so in disgust at seeing the nuggets and dust which rewarded
the toil of more industrious men, they left Hokitika and reached
Nelson on their way to Picton, the chief town of the adjoining
province of Marlborough. Most of the gold found its way under a