more than L1,000 worth of gold before nightfall.  Some of the more fortunate prospectors had their footsteps dogged by watchful bands bent on sharing their good luck.  One of them, however, named Fox, managed to elude this espionage for some time, and it was the Government geologist—­now Sir James Hector—­who, while on a scientific journey, discovered him and some forty companions quietly working in a lonely valley.

The goldfields of Otago had scarcely reached the zenith of their prosperity before equally rich finds were reported from the west coast of the Canterbury province.  From the year 1860 it was known that gold existed there, but the difficulties of exploring a strip of broken surf-beaten coast, cut off from settled districts by range upon range of Alps, and itself made up of precipitous hills, and valleys covered with densest jungle and cloven by the gorges of bitterly cold and impassable torrents, were exceptionally great.  More than one of the Government officers sent there to explore were either swept away by some torrent or came back half-crippled by hunger and rheumatism.  One surveyor who stuck to his work for months in the soaking, cheerless bush, existing on birds, bush-rats, and roots, was thought a hero, and with cause.  Even Maoris dreaded parts of this wilderness, and believed it to be the abode of dragons and a lost tribe of their own race.  They valued it chiefly as the home of their much-prized jade or greenstone.  Searching for this, a party of them, early in 1864, found gold.  Later on in the same year a certain Albert Hunt also found paying gold on the Greenstone creek.  Hunt was afterwards denounced as an impostor, and had to fly for his life from a mob of enraged and disappointed gold-seekers; but the gold was there nevertheless.  In 1865 the stream which had been pouring into Otago was diverted to the new fields in Westland, and in parties or singly, in the face of almost incredible natural difficulties, adventurous men worked their way to every point of the west coast.  In a few months 30,000 diggers were searching its beaches and valleys with such results that it seemed astonishing that the gold could have lain unseen so long.  Many lost their lives, drowned in the rivers or starved to death in the dripping bush.  The price of provisions at times went to fabulous heights, as much as L150 being paid for a ton of flour, and a shilling apiece for candles.  What did prices matter to men who were getting from 1 oz. to 1 lb. weight of gold-dust a day, or who could stagger the gold-buyers sent to their camps by the bankers by pouring out washed gold by the pannikin?  So rich was the wash-dirt in many of the valleys, and the black sand on many of the sea-beaches, that for years L8 to L10 a week was regarded as only a fair living wage.  In 1866 the west coast exported gold to the value of L2,140,000.