VII.
Hokitika,
My dear St. John,
Now for some account of more than a year's experience here among the gold winners. My parish measures sixty by forty miles, with a population of 30,000. With my colleague, G. Beaumont, we maintain Church work in these centres; Greymouth, thirty miles to the north; Ross, twenty-five miles southwards; Beaumont living with me at Hokitika, and devoting his time to Ross and Greymouth. This means single-handed work for me, with much going on foot in a country broken up with ravines, negotiable only by forest tracks, which are shut in by thick underwood, a jungle, in fact, with no short cuts.
Take an afternoon's visiting. Piloted by a surveyor to some new diggings three miles inland, following a newly cut track, we came to several shafts sunk about eighty feet on a "lead" of gold lately discovered. Gold here is usually found in strata, about three feet thick of wash-dirt running from nor'west to sou'east, narrow, and often interrupted by broken country. Over the shafts there are windlasses, with stout ropes, and hooks attached to the ends for winding up buckets of dirt, and also as the only means of descent. Looping the rope over one foot by the hook, straightening your leg, holding on to the rope well
