There are here, upon the diggings, many military men and university graduates, who generally retain their polish of manner, though outwardly they are often the roughest of the rough. Some of them tell strange stories. One Cambridge man, who was acting as a post-office clerk (not at Hokitika), told me that in 1862, shortly after taking his degree, he went out to British Columbia to settle upon land. He soon spent his capital at billiards in Victoria City, and went as a digger to the Frazer River. There he made a “pile,” which he gambled away on his road back, and he struggled through the winter of 1863-4 by shooting and selling game. In 1864 he was attached as a hunter to the Vancouver‘s Exploring Expedition, and in 1865 started with a small sum of money for Australia. He was wrecked, lost all he had, and was forced to work his passage down to Melbourne. From there he went into South Australia as the driver of a reaping machine, and was finally, through the efforts of his friends in England, appointed to a post-office clerkship in New Zealand, which colony he intended to quit for California or Chili. This was not the only man of education whom I myself found upon the diggings, as I met with a Christchurch man, who, however, had left Oxford without a degree, actually working as a digger in a surface mine. In the outskirts of Hokitika, I came upon a palpable Life Guardsman, cooking for a roadside station, with his smock worn like a soldier‘s tunic, and his cap stuck on one ear in Windsor fashion. A “squatter” from near Christchurch, who was at The Buller, selling sheep, told me that he had an ex-captain in the Guards at work for weekly wages on his “sheep-run,” and that a neighbor had a lieutenant of lancers rail-splitting at his “station.” Neither the habits nor the morals of this strange community are of the best. You never see a drunken man, but drinking is apparently the chief occupation of that portion of the town population which is not actually employed in digging. The mail-coaches which run across the island on the great new road, and along the sands to the other mining settlements, have singularly short stages, made so, it would seem, for the benefit of the keepers of the “saloons,” for at every halt one or other of the passengers is expected to “shout,” or “stand,” as it would be called at home, “drinks all round.” “What‘ll yer shout?” is the only question; and want of coined money need be no hinderance, for “gold-dust is taken at the bar.” One of the favorite amusements of the diggers at Pakihi, on the days when the store-schooner arrives from Nelson, is to fill a bucket with champagne, and drink till they feel “comfortable.” This done, they seat themselves in the road, with their feet on the window-sill of the shanty, and, calling to the first passer, ask him to drink from the bucket. If he consents--good: if not, up they jump, and duck his head in the wine, which remains for the next comer.