impression he
makes upon the "boss," depends his night's lodging and food, as well as
a job of work in the future. We will leave then the ideal swaggerer to
some other biographer who may draw glowing word-pictures of him in all
his jay's splendour, and we will confine ourselves to describing the
real swagger, clad in flannel shirt, moleskin trowsers, and what were
once thick boots, but might now be used as sieves.

Nothing astonished me so much in my New Zealand Station Life as these
visitors. Even Sir Roger de Coverley himself would have looked with
distrust upon most of our swagger-guests, and yet I never heard of an
instance in our part of the country where the unhesitating, ungrudging
hospitality extended by the rich squatters to their poorer compatriots
was ever abused. I say "in our part," because unfortunately, wherever
gold is discovered, either in quartz or riverbed, the good old primitive
customs and ways die out of themselves in a few weeks, and each
mammon-seeker looks with distrust on a stranger. Only fifty or sixty
miles from us, as the crow might fly across the snowy range, where an
immense Bush clothes the banks of the Hokitika river right down to its
sand-filled mouth on the West Coast, the great gold diggings broke
out seven or eight years ago, and changed the face of society in that
district in a few days. _There_ a swagger meant a man who might rob or
murder you in your sleep after you had fed and lodged him; or--under
the most favourable circumstances supposing him to be a "milder mannered
man,"--a "fossicker," who would not hesitate to "jump your claim," or
hang about when you are prospecting, to watch how much of the colour you
found, and then go off stealthily to return next day at the head of a
"rush" of a thousand diggers.

Even before the famous Maungatapu murders in 1866, swaggers were looked
upon with distrust on the West Coast, and after that date hardly any
one travelled in those parts without carrying a small revolver in
his breast-pocket. Nothing is more tantalising than an allusion to a
circumstance which is not well-known; and as I feel certain that very
few of my readers have ever heard of what may be called the first great
crime committed in the Middle Island, a brief account of that terrible
tragedy may not be out of place. Gold of course was at the bottom of it,
but the canvas-bags full of the glittering flakes were red with blood by
the time they reached the bank at Nelson. The d