d export from Auckland had risen to more than L1,100,000.

New Zealand still remains a gold-producing colony, albeit the days of
the solitary adventurer working in the wash-dirt of his claim with
pick, shovel, and cradle are pretty nearly over. The nomadic digger
who called no man master is a steady-going wage-earner now. Coal-mines
and quartz-reefs are the mainstays of Westland. Company management,
trade unions, conciliation cases, and laws against Sunday labour have
succeeded the rough, free-and-easy days of glittering possibilities
for everybody. Even the alluvial fields are now systematically worked
by hydraulic sluicing companies. They are no longer poor men's
diggings. In Otago steam-dredges successfully search the river
bottoms. In quartz-mining the capitalist has always been the
organizing and controlling power. The application of cyanide and other
scientific improvements has revived this branch of mining within the
last four years, and, despite the bursting of the usual number of
bubbles, there is good reason to suppose that the L54,000,000 which is
so far the approximate yield of gold from the Colony will during the
next decade be swelled by many millions.

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 t