mirth. Their owner also possessed a cockatoo with a great musical
reputation, but I never heard it get beyond the first bar of "Come
into the garden, Maud." Ill as I was, I remember being roused to
something like a flicker of animation when I was shown an
exceedingly seedy and shabby-looking blackbird with a broken leg in
splints, which its master (the same bird-fancying gentleman) assured
me he had bought in Melbourne as a great bargain for only 2 pounds
10 shillings!

After five days' steaming we arrived in the open roadstead of
Hokitika, on the west coast of the middle island of New Zealand, and
five minutes after the anchor was down a little tug came alongside
to take away our steerage passengers--three hundred diggers. The
gold-fields on this coast were only discovered eight months ago, and
already several canvas towns have sprung up; there are thirty
thousand diggers at work, and every vessel brings a fresh cargo of
stalwart, sun-burnt men. It was rather late, and getting dark, but
still I could distinctly see the picturesque tents in the deep
mountain gorge, their white shapes dotted here and there as far back
from the shore as my sight could follow, and the wreaths of smoke
curling up in all directions from the evening fires: it is still
bitterly cold at night, being very early spring. The river Hokitika
washes down with every fresh such quantities of sand, that a bar is
continually forming in this roadstead, and though only vessels of
the least possible draught are engaged in the coasting-trade, still
wrecks are of frequent occurrence. We ought to have landed our
thousands of oranges here, but this work was necessarily deferred
till the morning, for it was as much as they could do to get all the
diggers and their belongings safely ashore before dark; in the
middle of the night one of the sudden and furious gales common to