For my own part, I disagree with O'Gaygun on this point. Experience has led me to believe that the English manufacturer and trader stand unrivalled in all the arts of adulteration. The Yankee is a babe compared to them at this game. In fact, so far as exports are concerned, it would seem as if the British merchant could not help a greater or lesser measure of chicanery. What the Yankee sends to us is generally good; this in other matters besides hardware. But O'Gaygun's views are warped, and his conclusions are mainly drawn from the remembrance of one incident, the tale of which he is never weary of narrating. It seems that, shortly before he came out to New Zealand, O'Gaygun was concerned with others in the exportation from Ireland to America of a certain mineral. It was a heavy, white, glistening earth, which I take to have been witherite, or carbonate of baryta. This stuff was sold ostensibly for paint-making, and certain Yankee merchants bought up all they could of it. Shipload after shipload went to America, and the Irish speculators were in high glee as the demand for it increased; although such a quantity had been shipped as would have sufficed to have whitewashed the entire two continents. At last the real destination of the mineral came to light. It was powdered and mixed with flour, which America was then exporting largely to Europe. It made the finest flours heavier, and made seconds rank as first-class. So, according to O'Gaygun, hundreds and thousands of tons of this witherite were eaten by cheated Europe in the form of bread. A whole mountain, so he says, was shipped to the land of the Stars and Stripes; and as much as was sent came back to Europe as flour. When the thing was blown upon, of course, the export gradually ceased. And I believe that O'Gaygun and his associates were blamed for participation in the fraud. Therefore he, poor, deluded Irishman, has ever since held the Yankee to be of very nature iniquitous in all his dealings. Well, let us hope that kauri-gum is, after all, only an innocent varnish basis, as is generally stated, and that it is not eaten as pork or beans or anything by a too-confiding British public. The gum-diggers of Northern New Zealand are a peculiar body of nomads. They are recruited from every nation, and from every rank of society, and, like the communities gathered together on Australian or Californian gold-fields, present a strange medley of opposites.