The passage was a very uneventful one ; we called at the usual ports, including Naples, which is the most smellful city it has ever been my lot to visit. When the tide in the Lay of Naples is ebbing, there is a steady, all-pervading stink that almost hides the scenery, and which has given rise to the proverb "Smell Naples and die." This smell is not mentioned in any of the guide-books, as there is no fear that you will not notice it.

The ship was infested by a gang of thieves, who had shipped as stewards, and although nearly every one in the second saloon was robbed of valuables during the passage, and continual complaints were made to the purser, not the slightest effort was made by him or any of the ship's officers to trace the thefts.

The gang did pretty well our of me, as they relieved me from further trouble in taking care of four sovereigns, a match-box, a cheap watch, a gold chain worth about seven pounds, a gray sweater, a shaving brush, and a spade-ace guinea.

One of our most popular passengers was ex- Judge Martin; he had been giving a lot of chaff at the expense of one or two who had been robbed, and he was among some half-dozen of us who stayed the night at the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo. In the morning the legal luminary, arrayed in pyjamas and a bath towel, left his bedroom for a morning tub, and not till we were once more at sea did he discover that his pockets had been gone through in his absence in the bath-room but the wily Hindoo, or whoever he was who did the trick had, with careful forethought, left sufficient money for Mr Martin to foot his hotel bill and pay his rickshaw man, so that the theft should not be discovered till the victim had left, and thus an unseemly inquiry might be avoided.

At Adelaide we tried to catch a huge shark, that came and wallowed about on the surface of the water near the ship and languidlv gulped down several bits of coloured paper that were floating about ; the water was so clear that we could see every mark on his. body, and had not the key of my gun-case been among the luggage under hatchways, I could easily have shot him. He took the bait which was thrown him, but the rope was not strong enough, and broke, and he went forging away across the water with the hook in his stomach, and several yards of rope, to which a. billet of wood was attached as a float, streaming out behind him.

My ticket was for Lyttelton, but as I had a. fancy to see Auckland again, and had left several friends there when I went away, I got it changed for that port. The city was practically unchanged, and lay basking in the hot sun, amid its beautiful marine scenery, which in summer is unrivalled by any other town I have seen. The Bay of Naples is an arid, colourless bight, compared with the sparkling blue waters, the numberless little coves, and the thickly wooded steep glens, with their foliage overhanging the water, that compose the Waitemata.

  I landed one broiling hot day in December, and took the road to Ponsonby suburb. I think almost every city has its distinctive smell-at least in warm latitudes. Although I had been away five years, yet the old familiar Auckland smell, -a mixture of trumpet-lilies, hot, baked dust, sawn-wood and sea-was still the same. A Chinese hawker, with bent knees, shambling gait, and the look of unspeakable age that seems to stamp the face of every Chinkie, was another long-forgotten, but familiar sight. His face was the colour a meerschaum pipe takes after about the fifth time of smoking, and he might have been any age between one and two hundred.

The city seemed unchanged, but the old Mends whom I had hoped to see were scattered; some had gone bankrupt, some had got married, and the five years that had elapsed since I saw them had played "old Harry" with most of my pals. I felt disappointed and "out of it"; so partly for the sake of the fresh experience, and partly because I was hard up, but chiefly because the work left one his own boss, I rolled up a swag, and, after a week's fishing at Mahuranghi, set off for the gum-fields. I knew nothing of this work, but I took ship for Mongonui, the most northerly port in New Zealand. where I landed on the third morning after leaving Auckland. it was a morning common enough up there, of hazy, shimmering heat, in which the horizon seemed to dance and quiver.

From information I got at Mongonui, which township appeared to consist chiefly of two pubs and a post office, remote each from each, as the late Mr Euclid has it, I set off over the ranges for Awanui, about twenty miles away, and, as I topped the hill behind the township, and saw mile after mile of manuka-covered landscape rolling away to the horizon, unspoilt by clearing or town ship, the old spirit of joyous vagabondage awoke, the spirit that brought our Aryan forefathers from the plains of Asia, the spirit of Odin the Wanderer, that still sends his English children to the ends of the earth, and I felt glad that I had left the artificial life of towns behind me.

It is hard to define why the bush and the wilderness have such fascination for the man who has once lived therein. Yet it is a very real attraction, and he seldom outgrows it. He may loathe the scant and bad food, have to endure heat and cold, sandflies, damp. and loneliness ; but if he returns to the life of cities, lie always feels, more or less vaguely, that other life calling to him to come back. Perhaps it is that European man has been civilised only a few generations, compared with the unnumbered generations that went before, during which lie was native to fell and moorland ; and so it needs but a taste of the old life to scratch through the thin veneer, and produce a " throw back " to the state that during hundreds of thousands of years was habitual to him.

There had been a spell of very dry weather, and after passing a large river near Mongonui, I found all the creeks for the next twelve miles were dried up-a state of things very uncommon in New Zealand. In the late afternoon I struck a belt of timber, and found a creek there, so I camped and boiled my billy. When I had finished my tea, I heard someone walking on the track at the other side of the timber, so I "cooeyed," and presently the traveller came up to my fire. I made some fresh tea, and, when he had drank it he told me ho had been to the settlement at Mongonui, to get a tooth pulled out, and had a camp on a gumfield called Ronga flat. about twenty-five miles away. His name was Brereton. When he heard I was a new-chum at gum-digging, he suggested I should go to Renga Flat, and I agreed, so we took the track together.

The rest of the way to Awanui was very rough walking; I had on a pair of loose half. Wellingtons, which had raised a blister on one of my heels, that in time had become a raw, red patch as big as a two-shilling-piece, and this made me walk lame; seeing this, Brereton offered to carry my swag for me, and would, believe, have carried it all the way to Awanui if I had let him. We stayed over-night at the pub in this little settlement, and next morning Brereton went on to the mouth of a creek some four miles away, where a small coasting boat, that collected gum, was due to sail to Renga Flat. I intended to stay at the pub for a day, and then go overland, as I could not hurry to catch the boat with my sore foot. There was an Irish gum-digger knocking don his cheque at this pub: he had saved about £32 during the last four or five months, and told me with great satisfaction that he had had the forethought to hand the publican's wife seven pounds to keep for him; the rest of his cheque he was striking down as fast as he could, shouting for a crowd of Maoris and a few whites, that were hanging round the pub. Then he took a flask of whisky and walked for a couple of hundred yards along the road, where he sat on the grass drinking it and talking to another gum-digger. Every now and then he was sick, but this did not interrupt, for more than a few moments, either his' drinking or conversation. He seemed very good-hearted, but owing to years of toll, isolated from his fellow-creatures, the idea of going don to Auckland and having a month's holiday in a reasonable fashion probably never occurred to him. He was an old man, and the survival of an old colonial type now seldom met with: the type that hands its cheque to the boss of the nearest grog-shanty, says," Tell me when that's gone," and leaves with empty

pockets a few clays later, and with perhaps a bottle of grog as a farewell gift from the publican to keep off the jim-jams, for another long spell of lonely work in the bush.

Later on that day I heard that the boat Brereton had gone to catch would not leave till the afternoon, as she was stuck in the mud of the creek waiting for high tide, so I set off to catch her, Half-way there I met Brereton on a horse, which he had borrowed, returning to tell me I could catch the boat. We spent most of the afternoon lying on the bank, watching them ease the boat out of the mud, and turn her in a narrow creek, by means of ropes, which they tied to trees on the banks. She was only a tiny craft, and as she usually carried Maoris, her bunks were lousy. so I slept among some kauri timber on the deck. Next morning they set Joe and me ashore on a stretch of yellow sand backed by a cliff, and, after a wash in a creek, we set off for Renga Flat, which we reached at mid-day Brereton's whare, built of wood and sacking,

 with a fireplace of sods, was undisturbed. In the gum-fields remote from towns you can leave your belongings, and perhaps five pounds worth of gum, for a week, tie your door up with a piece of string, and. come back to find everything untouched by the Maoris or whites; and I have heard that the same honesty is common among the pioneers on gold-fields. Renga Flat was a dismal ti-tree-covered waste, broken by sand-hills and swamps ; it lies on the narrow neck of land a few miles south of the North Cape, from where, the Maoris believe, their ghosts start for eternity: from what I could gather, they hold that the North Cape is the last earthly spot the ghost passes, and that it forms a kind of spring-board for the take-off into the Land of the Hereafter.

I slept that night in the open, under some ti-tree scrub, as there was no room in Brereton's whare, and next day began to build my whare ; another digger, unasked, gave up his day's work to help me. The framework was of wood, covered with sacks, whose seams we unpicked, and then sewed the material together. It was the dry season: in wet weather a double ceiling of sacks, separated by a space, is necessary. I didn't trouble about a fireplace, but cooked in the open.

Gum-digging is pretty hard work the usual day's programme was to get up, cook your breakfast, pack your blankets away in a sack to prevent them getting- fly-blown and walk perhaps two or three miles to where you intend to dig ; then you drive a thin steel spear, about seven feet long, down into the earth. the spear is only about a quarter of an inch square and goes down easily enough ; you try in different places till you feel the gum below the surface. The gum is generally found on the site of an ancient kauri forest, which was burnt in prehistoric times. The charred remains of the trees are now some feet below the earth, and you often have to cut through the timber with an axe when you are digging ; the ground is often swampy, and then it is necessary to work standing in the black bog water. and to bail it out with a bucket. It is easy to tell gum from wood when the spear strikes it, as it has a brittle glassy feel. At sundown you carry your gum home in a pikau on your back, and, after cooking your supper, spend the evening scraping it with a knife to prepare it for the market. There was a bog hole near my whare, only about three yards across, in which I used to have my morning dip ; it must have been very deep, as, leaping in from the bank, I never could touch the bottom. Our water we got by digging a hole in the swamp, and waiting till it became full by water straining in through the sides of the hole. There were a few scattered camps of gum-diggers on the flat, and of these the Maoris seemed to get the most gum; these Maoris used sometimes to come and yarn in my whare. One turned up one night in a state of excitement, and said he had seen a ghost, and told a long rambling tale about another man and a horse that had seen it too. The ghost appeared on a strip of the sea shore; the rider had been unable to force his horse past it, and the latter had bolted. The probable explanation was that the rider had been scared by a piece of ti-tree waving in the wind. As everyone knows a rider's excitement is quickly felt by his horse, and the animal bolted, but to Maori Jim, as we called him, the fact that the horse had been frightened and nervous was logical proof that he had seen a real live spook. There are all sorts of men on the gumfields-from Austrian peasants to broken down English aristocrats. Despite the romances written about the latter by Ouida and others, they are often nothing but shiftless "boozers."

There are also a lot of "half -looney" men gum-digging, as in out-back shepherding and every other occupation that entails much lonely and solitary life ; these men are capable of earning a living, but a bit "ratty " with regard to small matters.

About two miles from my whare lived a solitary gum-digger, who went by the name of " Old Mystery" ; I do not mean to infer that he was "looney," but he never liked to have anyone visit him. He had a dog which he had taught to lie on its back. and drink out of a bottle. He was the only man on Renga Flat who had a teapot. The work that man did would have brought him in a comfortable living at almost anything but gum-digging.

He planted a small garden on an unproductive, dusty patch, and wove a thick fence of ti-tree round it ; when the drought came he dug down and down, following the retreating water, until he had made a great chasm in the earth, which you descended by steps, to find about half a gallon of water at the bottom. It would have been easy for him to have shifted camp a mile or two and found water near the surface, but he seemed to enjoy work; it was a pity to see such energy spent in making a bare living.

None of the diggers that I met, except the old Irishman at Awanui, ever saved anything, and were mostly in debt to the nearest storekeeper ; it was a saying at Renga Flat, that once there, it took a man seven years to earn enough to get away again. The nearest store to the Flat used to charge very high prices, so after digging there for some time, I thought I would go down to Auckland, and bring up a big case of groceries, &c. So one morning I went to the point on the coast where the little steamer generally stopped, but found she wasn't due till next day, so stayed over night, at the homestead of a man who had cattle running on the Crown lands, from Renga Flat to about forty miles to the southward. There were two bunks in the tiny bedroom, the beds of which were composed chiefly of the old garmeuts of the family, covered with a blanket. I had noticed during the day a strange-looking man who was mooning about, and who only muttered when he was spoken to; the settler told me he had come to Renga Flat the day before by boat, with gum-digging tools, given one look round, and asked when was the next boat back. While I was having a read in bed, this man came in, undressed, and took the other bunk ; when I spoke to him he only muttered and gibbered to himself, so I went on reading. Suddenly he told me to put the candle out, but I told him I had not finished with it, and went on reading. He suddenly sprang up, and blew it out ; but I had matches handy, so I lit it again, and kept it on my pillow, out of his reach. He turned out to be a harmless sort of crank, and did nothing but mutter to himself until I went to sleep, which I could not do until I had emptied the best part of a tin of Keating's into the bed.

On my arrival at Auckland, I found a letter front a man whose acquaintance I had made on board ship, offering me a temporary billet as assistant dairy-inspector at a small town in the South Island, so I bade Farewell to gum-digging, and took a steerage ticket for Lyttelton.

Going steerage on certain boats is not so bad as long as you sleep on deck ; but when the weather forces you below, you begin to realise that you are earning every penny of the money you have saved by not going saloon. The men all slept in one cabin in tiers of bunks fixed to the walls two deep there are two bunks on each level-an inside and an outside one. If you get an outside one you have to climb over the occupant of the other, and you sleep with your head separated by a partition about six inches high from the feet of the man in the next bunk- sometimes he happens to be a Chinaman. In rough weather, when half the occupants are sea-sick in their bunks, and the ports are shut, this cabin is a place to enter hurriedly, holding your breath, snatch up your blankets, do a sprint for the open air, and there find a sheltered spot on deck to pass the night. There was one wash-stand with a single roller towel for the use of all the male passengers, and in order that we might further beautify ourselves there was an ancient comb, with an accumulation of debris between the teeth. The wise man left these things alone, and contented himself with a dry polish until he got ashore. The food was in keeping with the rest. It is only fair to add that the cooking and the accommodation in the saloons of either of the New Zealand coastal lines are as good as generally in the steerage they are bad.

On this passage I met a weedy man with a watery eye, who told me with a strong Australian accent (which is really the accent of the Cockney) a tale of woe. He said he was an English University man, and had spent any amount of money, which he appeared to think was an act of merit. I asked him which university he had attended. He said "Liverpool University," and he couldn't talk decent English. As a rule the educated Englishman without money, who is battling along as rabbiter or rouseabout, preserves a deathlike silence as to his past ; it is generally none too creditable, and often he relieves the awful monotony of his life among men whose conversation is restricted to cattle-pups and sheep, in the " Waters of Lethe "-otherwise whisky. There is another type of new-chum, who battles along dourly, living the old things down and who won't go under. These are the men who, working and fighting-ever on the outside fringe of civilisation -helped to make the British Empire.

I put in six weeks at the dairy-inspecting job, and some awful specimens of consumptive cows, that had been giving full milk, I saw at the post mortems. I bought a horse for the work, which, being chiefly riding, suited me well enough.

When the district was finished I stayed a few days longer for the sake of the duck shooting, and got some good sport, shooting front a mimi. which I built on the edge of a lagoon, by driving four stakes into the mud and interlacing flax and grasses between strings stretched from post to post. If the mimi is built a few days before the season opens the ducks get used to it, and, with the help of decoys and a duck whistle, it is easy to attract them within gun-shot, as you sit inside the mimi, which from the outside looks like a natural clump of reeds. Of course you must take your place during the night, as the game is on the wing chiefly during the first hour after sunrise.

After getting my cheque, I saddled up and took the road for Christchurch, distant about one hundred and ten miles. As my horse was not a weight-carrier, the journey took me two and a-half days. I had no definite object in going to Christchurch. The problem of how to make a living still confronted me. I was a good horseman and shot, and played a fairly sound hand at whist ; but, alack, these were not very marketable qualifications. On the morrow the idea of utilising my old hobby, physical culture, and my bodily strength, in starting a school of training, would suggest itself to me, to be put into practice with good results in Dunedin. But I had not thought of that then, and as the day wore along I was still wondering what I should do. Twilight came, gradually veiling and then blotting out the distant Southern Alps, as my leg-weary horse cantered on with me, into the darkness.

[THE END.]

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 Chapter One New Zealand 1894

Chapter Two Norway 1895

Chapter Three Exporting 1896

Chapter Four Argentina & Uruguay

Chapter Five Return To England

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