The Colonel managed to quiet this trouble, and one or two other disturbances the starting of which further convinced him that the natives, now that they had saved their crops, meant to fight, but this opinion the commissioner laughed at, and just at the moment when his services were most required the O.C. was sent with sixty of us to suppress a fancied Fenian rising on the goldfields of Hokitika. Naturally we looked forward to this trip with delight, as it would afford us a most agreeable change in the somewhat monotonous life we had been leading for the last few months, besides which the goldfields contained many opportunities for indulgence in vices our monasticism on the frontier did not permit. Hokitika is situated on the west coast of the South Island, and was what is known as a poor man’s diggin’s--_i.e._ a goldfield that a man with no capital can win gold from by his own labour. The New Zealand goldfields were never such rowdy ones as the Californian nor the Australian, being free, with few exceptions, from bushrangers and the murderous riff-raff that congregated at the American mines. Yet they were rough, and a strong party of Irishmen, known as the Micks, were apt, especially when under the influence of whisky, to make themselves objectionable. It must be remembered that at this epoch things were very stormy in Ireland, and even in England, and the Micks instigated by whisky had held meetings and talked a lot of infernal rot, from which the warden of the goldfields, a nervous ass, had imagined possibilities of Fenian risings, insurrections, civil war and the Lord only knows what other catastrophes; hence the reason for withdrawing the O.C. and the greater portion of his reliable men from the west coast of the North Island just when their services were most required. However, we who composed the party looked on the whole trip as a joke, and a pleasant interlude to the hard work and short rations we had had for so long to endure. As for any fighting with Fenians that none of us believed, although Tim and myself conjectured there might be some heads broken by way of a frolic. It was in this spirit we took ship and went to sea, eventually reaching Hokitika, where we had to land in surf boats, through a very bad surf indeed. We, however, passed through it in safety, when we were joined by the Colonel, who had gone ashore previously. The authorities had begged him to land us with loaded arms, and had prophesied all sorts of bloody happenings, but the Colonel had very rightly taken their wailings with a pinch of salt, so we reached the shore in the most unostentatious manner, at a time when the Micks were sleeping off their previous night’s debauch, and we were quickly marched up to a spot the Colonel had selected, where we expeditiously made ourselves safe and snug.