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.