perhaps worrying time at business, carried his unpleasant temper into his domestic circle and made himself as disagreeable as possible. He growled out a half-smothered curse, none the less vicious because it was somewhat suppressed, threw the six-shooter on my bunk, kicked off his wet boots, and vigorously "hung his hat up on the floor." I said nothing but quietly picked up the murderous weapon above-named, lit my pipe, slouched my hat, and walked resolutely into the darkness.

The mighty Kawarau river roared angrily two hundred feet below me. The rivers in that part of New Zealand are very swift and terrible. It is said that the Kawarau, which runs into the Molyneux, carries as much water into the sea as the Nile does. The part of the river bank on which we worked was a flat, rather near the water, called "Tucker Flat," because no one who had ever worked the ground before could get more than "Tucker" (food) out of it.

Above the flat towered high rocks upon a snug table of which we had built our huts-sheltered as much as possible from rain--beyond the reach of floods and protected to a great extent from the strong west winds which prevail in those regions. Down below, the river runs with terrific force between high cliffs of slaty quartz, through a gulch about 100 yards wide; that particular part of the Channel being called the Devil's Gully (His Majesty generally comes in for the choicest bits); and I am not sure that the whirlpool rapids of the Niagara, now so well known by reason of poor Webb's fatal exploit, present a more terrible "hell of waters" than these Rapids on the Kawarau; at all events, so far as my experience goes, they are certainly, after Niagara whirlpool rapids, the most terrific rush of waters I have ever seen. Seething, leaping, roaring, the river dashes on with a ceaseless fury and apparently irresistible force, which always had for me a powerful fascination, and, when looked upon for a while, produced a feeling akin to terror.

A sad fate befel a poor woman while I lived on Tucker flat. On the opposite bank of the river there was an Hotel-a mere shanty—and we used occasionally to go over for a "pitch" (chat) with the "other-siders." "How did we get over? do I hear you say?" An inch and a half wire rope had been stretched across the river and fastened in the rocks on each side, high up, 200 or 300 feet above the water, and a "bos'un's chair" on blocks ran from one end to the other of the rope. The passenger took his seat astride the chair, laid hold of the hauling line, and pulled himself across. It was was rather a giddy adventure for a novice, but we soon got accustomed to such a style of locomotion, and after a few journeys did not consider ourselves by any means so clever as "Blondin." Sometimes the other-siders would cross on the chair to have an hour or so with us, and one Sunday afternoon the wife of the hotelkceper, Mrs. Scheib, acting in opposition to good advice, ventured on the chair and undertook the risky journey :-and ever afterwards while I remained on the Flat, when the wind came howling up the gully, I fancied I could hear, mingling with it, the piercing and despairing shriek of that poor woman as she fell headlong into the surging waters which leaped up to receive her and crushed out her life long before she could

be borne upon the huge rocks in the river bed 400 yards lower down, and against which she must have been broken to pieces. Not a vestige of her remains was ever found. "Death came soon, and swift, and pangless," but it was a terrible closing scene in one Drama of Life.

66

As I strode down to our claim to keep watch, I could pick out the "shriek " of that poor woman from among the many dismal howlings of the wind, but I was not superstitious and I soon settled down to matter of fact thoughts. My mind gradually reverted to my mate Jim Carroll. I wondered how it was that a man could be so dead to all influences of kindness, so utterly insensible of the most ordinary processes of refinement of thought. He was a strange man-not ignorant--most reserved and suspicious. He spoke seldom and rarely smiled. There was no outward recommendation of any good qualities he might have possessed, and yet Jim was greatly respected. He had darkly hinted that he was a murderer, he was a splendid boxer, I remember him once throwing a man over a slab fence. On another occasion he pitched a man into the Arrow river; and one day, for a misdemeanour, he caught his dog by the tail, swung it round and dashed its head to pieces against the trunk of a tree. Jim could hit a dollar piece with a six-shooter at ten yards; he could "play Euchre and "Bluff" better than anyone round those diggings, and no one ever DARED to catch him cheating; he had a cold grey eye, bordering on yellow, like a tiger's, and so far as I was able to judge he knew no fear. There was, in those times and under those circumstances ample reason why Jim Carroll was greatly pected!" Truly adversity brings together strange bedfellows, and perhaps if I had not had "bad luck" on those diggings, I should not now have been writing an account of these incidents, for I feel quite sure that Jim would not have scrupled to shoot me through the head if my share of the gold had been the worth the sacrifice of a paltry human life! and so my thoughts ran on. I had no fear of Jim. We never quarrelled, and perhaps he had a more kindly feeling for me than he had for anyone else. Soon I got restless. My pipe was out. I sat down on a stone at the edge of the claim and looked down towards the tail-race 20 or 30 yards away below me ; but I could see nothing-so dark was it--and in addition to getting gradually wet through, I felt myself becoming quite nervous, and often turned my head half round thinking I heard 'something," for

"Sounds fearful and ominous arose and died
In the blank midnight,"

66

res

which seemed to chill my blood; but soon I pulled myself together and refilled my pipe, which I was just about to light when "Clang !"— VERY SOFTLY-" clang, clang, scrape, scrape!" Reader, how my hair crept upright along the back of my head! "So ho, steady, boy !" I whispered to myself. There was a Heathen Chinee at our tail-race. I pictured the sneaking vagabond quietly filching from us that which then was of more value to us than a good name.

What should I do? Should I fire? I could guess his position exactly; I knew every inch of the ground. I ought to fire, because I had a duty

SO.

to perform to my mates; and yet, suppose I hit him! I had never drawn trigger on a fellow creature, and I shrank from the responsibility of doing Perhaps I shared in some degree the feelings of Hamlet when he so grandly soliloquized; but my soliloquy was of the simplest and most practical kind. I was placed in a position of trust, and I must be faithful to the trust, and was morally bound to carry out the law, and protect the interests of the community by shooting at the thief.

"I must be cruel, only to be kind;

Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”

I took aim and fired. Crack! I was quite startled by the sudden report, which rattled and echoed along the rocks, adding confusion afresh to the discordant sounds already mentioned. My mates were out at once, calling, "What cheer, mate?" "All right, pards,”* I replied, "only a Chinaman !"

In an hour I was relieved, turned in, and slept till daybreak. There was just a trace of "John Chinaman's" work. He had loosened three stones, but was surprised before he had done any mischief. There was no sign that I had hit him, and I felt conscious of having done my duty properly, although my mates chaffed me a bit; even Jim Carroll asked me why I did not mount a pair of "barnacles."†

66

set in"

However, the affair was over, we washed up and got our bit of gold, which was not much more than tucker, and we decided not to there again, but to clear out and make fresh tracks.

As we were about moving away, big, jolly, good-natured Bill Heaton came strolling down the mountain side from Arrowtown, "on the Wallaby track." It was a short cut-saved seven miles. We "pitched a cuffer's or two, and he then suddenly said, "Did any of you boys shoot a Chinaman two or three nights ago ?" "Oh! my prophetic soul! Bill," said I, "I did,—did I kill him ?" "Never a bit of it, mate," said Bill, "but as I came along 'Whitechapel Flat' from the township who should I meet but Tim McCarthy, and he told me he saw one of the varmints scudding on one leg and a half down the pass to the Chinamen's camp two days ago, just about daybreak, with a bag and a longtailed shovel, and from what he's heard since he found the rascal had been out moonlighting,' and someone landed a 'leaden pill' into him, and the pig-eyedbandicoot '¶ won't be able to sit down for about a fortnight."

"Which is why I remark,

And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark,

And for tricks that are vain,

The "Heathen Chinee" is peculiar—

Which the same I am free to maintain."

*Partners.

H. C.

+ Spectacles.

Changing quarters in search of employment,
$ Colonial slang for "Carrying on a Conversation."
A colonial word for "a night stealer."

The Last King of the Piries and his Golden Trumpet.

T

I. THE COUNTRY OF THE PIXIES.

HERE is a peculiar interest attaching to Cornwall beyond all other English counties. From the moment the traveller crosses the River Tamar he enters the very home of poetry, imagination, and mystery; the land of the great King Arthur, the wizard and prophet Merlin, and the wicked Tregeagle; a country dear to the lovers of legend and tradition; a country of queerly named old saints, of giants fierce and bold, of elves and sprites, of pixies and mermaids, of witches and spectres. Here dwelt the Druids, priests of a long forgotten age, and whose monuments still are seen on lonely moors--great tapering stones pointing up from the earth like giant fingers--and to each, a romance-loving race has given its own particular story. It seems as though when all other parts of England got civilised, and common-place in their ways, the fairies and elves all passed the Tamar, and took their last refuge among the Cornishmen.

Whether we explore the grim shores of Tintagel and Camelford, for ever linked with the immortal myths of the enchanter Merlin, and of that good prince, whose birth and origin were always unknown—

For there was no man knew from whence he came :
But after tempest, when the long wave broke

All down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss,
There came a day as still as heaven, and then
They found a naked child upon the sands

Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea;
And that was Arthur-

or pass through the panorama of wild bleak moors and waste lands "mid the lone majesty of untamed nature," until we come south-westwards to Penzance, and St. Michael's Mount-the country of the Giants, the home of Trebiggen and Gogmagog, of Cormoran and Blunderbore, against which two last our familiar nursery hero, Jack the Giant Killer, waged successful war; and away across the sea at Scilly these Titans of old have found their burial place.

If we turn eastward of Corineus's land we come to St. Austell and Looe, where are the unhappy hunting grounds of the demon spirit, Tregeagle, and which, the legends say, he still haunts ; and where, like the Wandering Jew, the Man with the Cork Leg, and "Poor Joe," he still is "moving on" o'er dreary heath and sandy hill and rocky shore, pursued by troops of howling and avenging fiends, who, in the form of spectral dogs, hurry him on for ever. When the wintry gale is at its highest, above the moaning of the wind and the thunder of the waves, is heard the shrieks of the unhappy, tortured Tregeagle.

Veritable history is mingled with strange song and story, for here, at Falmouth, the brave defender of Pendennis Castle held out for King Charles long after all the other royal garrisons had surrendered, and stood a six months' siege by Cromwell and his Roundheads before he obeyed the inevitable, and hauled down his flag.

I said this is the country of the Saints—at least sixty towns and villages are called after different holy men and women—of good St. Perran, the discoverer of the Cornish mines; of the pigmy St. Neot, who was only fifteen inches high; of St. Nectan, who buried the silver bell of his church so cunningly that it has never since been found; of St. Kea, and St. German, and a host of others; indeed, if the Cornishmen were to keep all their saints' holydays I fear they would never have any time to catch pilchards for their fellow countrymen; but they are now chiefly good Methodists, or rabid Salvationists, and think no more of their ancient saints; yet they have some love of the Church left, for at Truro, is being erected a stately pile, which day by day rises higher above the surrounding roofs; pure and white and beautiful as may be anything of human origin-the first and only nineteenth century cathedral in the land, and which goes far to prove that the love of building churches worthy of the name is not yet extinct in England.

Many years ago, "when George the Third was King," there lived in the little village of St. Sennan, which is over against the Land's End, a poor widow woman, named Trenance, who had two children, one a baby, and the other a boy about ten years old. Her husband had been a miner in the great Botallack tin mine, but had been killed by a fall when at work just after her baby was born. Mrs. Trenance gained a scanty living by sewing, and by helping in the fields of neighbouring farms.

Tom, the eldest boy, was a clever, thoughtful lad, and often brought in a little addition to the family income by acting as a guide to the occasional visitors who came to see the Land's End.

There are many portions of our island where much grander scenery is to be met with than here, where are no towering mountains nor sweet woodland spots, but there is no place so interesting to the lover of history and antiquity: it is the Bolerium of the Ancients, "the seat of storms," the end of our local world.

6

In the golden days of Elizabeth the people of these parts must have beheld with wondering eyes many a little cockle-shell vessel pass by, sailing away Westward Ho," manned by the bravest of hearts of oak, and captained by the noblest sailors that mother earth has ever borne ;— a Raleigh, a Hawkins, a Frobisher, a Grenville, a Drake, all bent on seeking a fortune or a glorious grave in the New World. Along and about these dangerous coasts that stupendous failure, the great Armada, began its ill-fated cruise northwards; and many a huge galleon was wrecked and dashed to pieces hereabouts, and many an aching mother's heart, in Spain, wondered and watched and waited in vain for the sons who never came back to her.