A Reminiscence.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 64, 10 September 1894, Page 2

A Reminiscence.

"A man found drank outside a Palmerston hotel had £22* in Iris . pocket." Clearly no one had time "to go through him." This reminds us of a" I little incident which happened in, the early "seventies." We - were anxious to " get into the King Country "and, as most people know now, because our errand was gold prospecting~we did not get there. One evening by the camp fire, sitting, and talking: about old West Coast times — good and bad — our sturdy little mate -said, ".Well, there's queer things. I was stone broke, not a pipe of tobaccy or the smell of a shilling. My heart was full though my stomach was that empty I could have eaten a live man. Juhad been travelling along the East Coast all day, hoping to come to a farmer Maori pah, but, being weak of 'Course! I did not get along very fast. Well, the night overtook me, though r still pushed ahead, scrambling over , the rocks in the dark, feeling sad : and lonely, and miserable as only a once lucky miner can feel when he has not a. penny in his pocket, nor a friend- in the world. Then I put my hand on what I knew was the body of a man. I felt him from the waist upwards -to see if there was any life in him, and my left hand, passing over hi* breast, fell into a gap in his throat wJuch was cat from ear to ear «od so deep that I touched the bone ol his neok. I couldn't be sick for ft had nothing to be sick on, but I ran until I fell into a small bit of a creek out of ;Wjueh a kindly old Maori lady' fished mein the early morning.. To make a long story short, what riled me r was this: the dead man had over thirty jiotesia his pockets which nobody «^sr got any good by— for I swejar 1^ ifelations never saw a penny of it*— while if I had been game to fikt^ " gone through him " I was set up for a month or two. So you'll see, piously concluded the narrator, you're, always, out of luck wh,en yqu hayn'fa pePtUp