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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume X, Issue 97, 23 April 1875, Page 4

don't know, for there is no apparent reason for either same. It is a small diggings, waiting like the others for "water." On again to Stafford Town, a larger and more pretentious place, with a street principally of hotels, and, like Kevell-street, Hokiiika, narrow, crooked, and dirty. Here again there was an air of general' depression, but the same expectation of better times when those great pipes at Hokitika have been fixed some miles away in the back bush, and water comes rushing through them, with which the miners may pound jaway at the terraces and •wash out the gold. Two or three miles from Stafford Town is Goldsborough, the chief city of the Waimea district. It is not very large, and has no Cathedral or Bishop as most colonial Tillages have, but there is a beautiful Gothic church and on extremely comfortable Presbytery, built by an old Nelsonian, Father Chareyre, who has certainly done wonders The site for the church and house had to be cut out of the Bolid reef, and then earth bad to he carted on to it for a garden, &c. It took gangs of from ten to twenty men some 500 days to do all thia clearing — and the labor was. nearly all gratuitous —and there stands this ' neat church with the bright green turf all round it, and the priest's house in the midst of a smiling garden. As a fellow-traveller remarked, certainly some people must believe in their religion to spend so j much time and money and work in building churches and making their clergy comfortable. The great Waimea Water Race is to belch forth its great stream of wealthproducing water just here, but there is just a little matter I heard a whisper of - from a party of miners that the race will command only _ a comparatively limited amount of ground, as it has not been constructed at a sufficiently high level to be of use on the slopes of the hills on the seaboard. .. All it can be used for will be to sluicV the gullies and valleys from Goldsborough to Piper't Flat. ..;•' I don't know how far this is correct, but 1 can hardly think such an enormous expense would have been^ incurred without some better prospect of remunerative use for the water than is to be found in the limited area above mentioned. Leaving Goldsborough, the road at once becomes more hilly; it is still through the interminable bush, but it is not so provokingly level. As wej mount the hills, a charming poep is/ occasionally obtained across five or six miles of forest, with the blue sea in the distance. At last we reach the Teremakau river, and are taken across in a punt, each passenger having to pay toll. In being ferried across one could not help thinking of .the many brave fellows who had been drowned in its \ treacherous waters, and I confess this reflection took all the charm out of the scenery for me. I knew so many of these 4 victims of the cruel Teremakau, and although I had never seen the river before, it was quite familiar from descriptions in letters, and from those trying enquiries from desolate widows in far oil lands as to the dates when certain persons were drowned in a river called the Teremakau, and who, from the descriptions given in such and * such papers, seemed to correspond with absent husbands. It is amazing that a river like this, crossing the main road of the province, is not bridged. People are talking of a railway from Hokitika to Greymouth, and that will come in time no doubt, but surely a' bridge ia an -important and pressing necessity, or are immigrants eo superabandant that we can afford to bo reckless in the matter of saving a few lives ? The view from the Steep Hill, as it is called, is magnificent in the extreme, miles of undulating forest, and then the bright sea, and over and around us as far as we can see the bluest of blue sky. So down we go at a headlong - pace, and dash inio tbe vale where the town of Marsden peacefully slumbers. I ÜBe that word 'slumbers' advisedly. There is something Nelsonian about Marsden ; it is very pretty, people lake things quietly, and are generally well to do. Even the hotels, notwithstanding their number, looked respectable and comfortable. We change horses here and strike again into the forest, the road once more a dead level, and , few people about, a stray Chinaman occasionally trudging along by himself playirtg on a one-stringed fiddle. The other paasengorß laughed. I didn't, I was in a savagely sentimental mood; it was the road or the Teremakau, or something. Here, I reflected, is a poor and guileless stranger, a disciple no doubt of one of the greatest morpl philosophers that ever lived, who is wandering about in what to him' is a heathen and barbarous country. He is solacing himself' in his loneliness with some musical strain- that carries him back to the Pagoda^&rlhe end of the tea garden in the flowery land, where he and the almond-eyed maid with the funny little feet, used to talk soft nothings. Do you, you unbelieving barbarian, eay they don't do such things in China? Nonsense! look at you willow-pattern plate, where you will see this pair of celestial spooneys rushing to meet each other on the rustic bridge. At last a great puff of wind, and lo! we are out of the forest and in Greymouth;