he 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----!

The resin may be found in tree-forks high above the ground. Climbing
to these by ropes, men have taken thence lumps weighing as much as a
hundredweight. But most and the best resin is found in the earth, and
for the last generation the soil of the North has been probed and
turned over in search of it, until whole tracts look as though they
had been rooted up by droves of wild swine. In many of these tracts
not a pine is standing now. How and when the forests disappeared,
whether by fire or otherwise, and how soil so peculiarly sterile could
have nourished the finest of trees, are matters always in dispute.
There is little but the resin to show the locality of many of the
vanished forests. Where they once were the earth is hungry, white, and
barren, though dressed in deceptive green by stunted fern and
manuka. In the swamps and ravi