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 diggings on the West Coast were only two years old at that date, and although it was not uncommon for prospecting parties cutting their way, axe in hand, through the thick bush, to come upon skeletons of men in lonely places, still it might be taken for granted that these were the remains of early explorers or travellers who had got lost and starved to death within the green tangled walls of this impenetrable forest.

The scenery of that part of the Middle Island is far more beautiful than in the agricultural or pastoral districts.

Giant Alps clothed half up their steep sides with evergreen pines,--whose dark forms end abruptly where snow and ice begin,--stand out against a pure sky of more than Italian blue, and only when a cleared saddle is reached can the traveller look down over the wooded hills and vallies rolling away inland before him, or turn his eyes sea-ward to the bold coast with its many rivers, whose wide mouths foam right out to where the great Pacific waves are heaving under the bright winter sun.
Such, and yet still more fair must have been the prospect on which Burgess, Kelly, Levy, and Sullivan's eyes rested one June morning in the mid-winter of 1866.

They were, one and all, originally London thieves, and had been transported years before to the early penal settlements of Australia.