The gold-digger is found in many parts of the earth; the gum-digger belongs to New Zealand alone.  With spade, knife, and gum-spear he wanders over certain tracts of the province of Auckland, especially the long, deeply-indented, broken peninsula, which is the northern end of New Zealand.  The so-called gum for which he searches is the turpentine, which, oozing out of the trunk of the kauri pines, hardens into lumps of an amber-like resin.  Its many shades of colour darken from white through every kind of yellow and brown to jet.  A little is clear, most is clouded.  Half a century ago, when the English soldiers campaigning against Heke had to spend rainy nights in the bush without tent or fire, they made shift to get light and even warmth by kindling flame with pieces of the kauri gum, which in those days could be seen lying about on the ground’s surface.  Still, the chips and scraps which remain when kauri-gum has been cleaned and scraped for market are used in the making of fire-kindlers.  But for the resin itself a better use was long ago found—­the manufacture of varnish.  At the moment when, under Governor Fitzroy, the infant Auckland settlement was at its lowest, a demand for kauri-gum from the United States shone as a gleam of hope to the settlers, while the Maoris near the town became too busied in picking up gum to trouble themselves about appeals to join Heke’s crusade against the Pakeha.  Though the trade seemed to die away so completely that in a book written in 1848 I find it briefly dismissed with the words, “The bubble has burst,” nevertheless it is to-day well-nigh as brisk as ever, and has many a time and oft stood Auckland in good stead.

[Illustration:  KAURI PINE TREE

Photo by J. MARTIN, Auckland]

The greater kauri pines show smooth grey trunks of from eight to twelve feet in diameter.  Even Mr. Gladstone would have recoiled from these giants, which are laid low, not with axes, but with heavy double saws worked on scaffolds six feet high erected against the doomed trees.  As the British ox, with his short horns and cube-like form, is the result of generations of breeding with a single eye to meat, so that huge candelabrum, the kauri, might be fancied to be the outcome of thousands of years of experiment in producing the perfection of a timber tree.  Its solid column may rise a hundred feet without a branch; its small-leaved patchy foliage seems almost ludicrously scanty; it is all timber—­good wood.  Clean, soft, easily worked, the saws seem to cut it like cheese.  It takes perhaps 800 years for the largest pines to come to their best.  So plentiful are they that, though fires and every sort of wastefulness have ravaged them, the Kauri Timber Company can put 40,000,000 feet of timber through their mills in a year, can find employment for two thousand men, and can look forward to doing so for another twenty years.  After that——!