knife, he collected in ten hours nearly five-and-twenty pounds’ worth of the yellow metal.  Then he sunk hole after hole for some distance, finding gold in all.  Unlike most discoverers, Read made no attempt to keep his fortune to himself, but wrote frankly of it to Sir John Richardson, the superintendent of the province.  For this he was ultimately paid the not extravagant reward of L1,000.  The good Presbyterians of Dunedin hardly knew in what spirit to receive the tidings.  But some of them did not hesitate to test the field.  Very soberly, almost in sad solemnity, they set to work there, and the result solved all doubts.  Half Dunedin rushed to Tuapeka.  At one of the country kirks the congregation was reduced to the minister and precentor.  The news went across the seas.  Diggers from Australia and elsewhere poured in by the thousand.  Before many months the province’s population had doubled, and the prayerful and painful era of caution, the day of small things, was whisked away in a whirl of Victorian enterprise.  For the next few years the history of Otago became a series of rushes.  Economically, no doubt, “rush” is the proper word to apply to the old stampedes to colonial goldfields.  But in New Zealand, at any rate, the physical methods of progression thither were laborious in the extreme.  The would-be miner tramped slowly and painfully along, carrying as much in the way of provisions and tools as his back would bear.  Lucky was the man who had a horse to ride, or the rudest cart to drive in.  When, as time went on, gold was found high up the streams amongst the ice-cold rivers and bleak tussock-covered mountains of the interior, the hardships endured by the gold-seekers were often very great.  The country was treeless and wind-swept.  Sheep roamed over the tussocks, but of other provisions there were none.  Hungry diggers were thankful to pay half a crown for enough flour to fill a tin pannikin.  L120 a ton was charged for carting goods from Dunedin.  Not only did fuel fetch siege prices, but five pounds would be paid for an old gin-case, for the boards of a dray, or any few pieces of wood out of which a miner’s “cradle” could be patched up.  The miners did not exactly make light of these obstacles, for, of the thousands who poured into the province after the first discoveries, large numbers fled from the snow and starvation of the winters, when the swollen rivers rose, and covered up the rich drift on the beaches under their banks.  But enough remained to carry on the work of prospecting, and the finds were rich enough to lure new-comers.  In the year 1863 the export of gold from Otago rose to more than two millions sterling.  Extraordinary patches were found in the sands and drift of the mountain torrents.  It is recorded of one party that, when crossing a river, their dog was swept away by the current on to a small rocky point.  A digger went to rescue it, and never was humanity more promptly rewarded, for from the sands by the rock he unearthed