PIGS AT ROTORUA.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume XI, Issue 1302, 29 March 1883, Page 4

PIGS AT ROTORUA.

MOW of the wharea (writes a correspondent of the Auckland " Herald” from the Hot Lakes) are surrounded by gardens, in which the peach tree and tobacco plant are conspicuous by their almost luxuriance, The small cultivations are surrounded by high wooden fences of ti-tree, not only as a preventive against the Incursions of fowls, but as a barrier against the depredations of the innumerable pigs, which, when they are not grubbing about, and doing all the mischief they can, or fraternising familiarly with the children, are taking siestas in the overflowing waters of the tepid springs, with an air of tranquil enjoyment, which would seem to indicate that they were utterly innocent of the fact that a large percentage of the human race had a predilection for boiled porks and beans. While writing of pigs, I may mention that when walking around the whares, and noticing the various phases of Maori hot-spring life, I saw half a dozen members of the porcine tribe c- , o quietly along with an easy, self-satisfied air, as if they had just gone through their morning ablutions in the warm bubbling fountains, and were going to root round for steamed potatoes, boiled cabbage, and other delicacies. Suddenly a half naked Maori slunk out of his whare, with a long knife between his teeth. Quick as thought, and with the skill of a champion assassin, he seised the foremost porker by the hind-leg. A prod from the knife, and the crimson blood of the murdered animal mingled with a rill of boiling water which was running past in a hurry, as it were, to cool itself in the lake. A twist of the wrist, and the pig was jerked into a steaming pool where the boiling waters twirled and hissed as if in a red-hot cauldron. Out again in an instant, and then they set of to work to scrape off the bristles, which cams awayin flakes, as if they had been simply stuck on by nature by the aid of a little glue, and the skin of the porker gleamed white as snow beneath the sun. In two minutes more he was disembowelled, and then he was placed over a steam-hole, with a couple of sacks over him, to be cooked for the evening meal. From the time that porker gaily walked the earth until the end of that terrible process, I think about 1.5 minutes expired, When I was in Chicago I saw a machine whore the “ hogs ” were put in at one end and came out sausages at the other, and in Taxes they told me, amongst other big things, that they had a machine by which the “ hogs," when •* dray-load in,” came out sausages too, but then this Texan machine was so Infinitely superior to that of Chicago that if you didn’t think the sausage quite up to the mark all you had to do was to put back your sausages into this wonderful apparatus, and forthwith they came out “ hogs.” But I know of no machines like those of Ohinemntu, where a pig can be caught, cured, and cooked within the space of 1-5 minutes. It requires one of Dame Nature s machines, in the shape of a red-hot boiling spring, to do that,