ONE OF THE MULTITUDE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIX, Issue 19, 14 May 1914, Page 3

ONE OF THE MULTITUDE.

(By “Sketch.”)

Mr C. Diamond, after four years’ occupation of the Club Hotel, relinquished Ids lease to-day. During a chat yesterday Mr Diamond related some of his experiences since coming to Now Zealand nearly forty years ago. At the age of seventeen, Mr Diamond, who is a native of Derry, Ireland, and, by the way, was a schoolmate and ‘‘townie” of the Rt. Hon the Premier (Mr \V. F. Massey) landed from the steamer Timaru (as she was then called) «t Port Chalmers in the 70’s. His first job was at Waikonaiti with “.lock” McKenzie, afterwards sO well known as Minister for Lands and the framer of some of the best land laws the Dominion bits known. Later, as it happened, he was associated with another Minister of the Crown, ■ this time in the person of the present Minister of Public Works, the Hon. W. Fraser, away tip in Earnsciengh on the hanks of the Molyueux. Here, according to the subject of this sketch, he spent many happy days—happy, of course, in the sense that he was young and vigorous and didn’t earn a Continental straw what came and went, although there was always plenty of hard work to be done. Good wages were to be made then, and young Diamond was lit for anything. And the prices were good, too. Shearing at £1 a hundred, and harvesting at a shilling or perhaps eighteen pence an hour, were to be had for the hefty lad that came along. And in following the “hack-delivery”—(there were no reapers and binders in those days of long hours and possibly no day was under twelve hours in length for work)— big cheques were to be made for the asking end the energy necessary to pile them up. Coal-carting to the diggers in the Bannockburn district, four miles from Cromwell, on the Carrack range, claimed Diamond for eighteen mouths, and these he put in with a well-known identity by the name of Jimmy Smith, those were the days of “wild-cats, when companies weve floated at the more mention of quartz or anything elye with a semblance of success and fortune in the near future. One very wild “wild-cat” of which Mr Diamond ims to-day lively recollections; was the flotation of a company for the developmmt of supposed antimony deposits. A company was formed in less than no time, and smelting works were erected. Tall chimneys reared their heads and smelting ovens kept the proposition warm for a time, but that was short indeed; and soon the company went hung and the bricks were sold at as much per thousand as they would tiring under .the auctioneer’s hammer, while the ovens followed suit and the brick-strewn scene was added to the speculator’s follies for which the country was then famous. The people had the fever of gold upon them, and any old prospectus was sufficient to tempt the gambler—mnd who was not at that time?—into parting with his easilygot gold and speculating with it. In his travels in Central Otago as miner, waggoner, contractor, and an all-round men, Mr Diamond got to know every inch of the Dunstan. That was before the railways, when a man had to “fly the flag” or to write in other and better known terms, had to “hump” bluey, or carry his swag. “Those were good times, though,” he says, “the best in my life. But the call of the north came to Mr Diamond, as it has done to many southerners, and Napier claimed him as her own in the beginning of the nineties. Here, some twenty years ago, Mr Diamond met and married his late wife, one who was a faithful and strong helpmeet, and whose unexpected demise was chronicled only a few months hack. Seven, years ago one of Patea’s publicans wag our friend, and for three years he remained at the little seaport tow n on the West Coast. But Taranaki, the land of milk and honey, always had big attractions for him, and four years have now passed since Mr Diamond took over the lease of the Club Hotel. There is no need for this article to he lengthened by a recital of the law-abiding and obliging manner in which the hostelry was conducted during that time, but it should bo mentioned that not a little of praise for the same was due to the late Mrs Diamond. Now, free from family ties, and the cares of business, Mr Diamond is looking for a holiday, and it is possible that in the course of a few weeks or even months he may book his passage for the Homeland, to revisit once more the scenes of bis youth, but there is nothing surer, he stated to the writer, than that he will return to the land of his adoption—the land where he has seen both good and rough times—“ God’s Own Country”—New Zealand. So may it be, and may bis holiday be one long joy-ride, but this the writer knows—travel will not change nor custom stale the infinite variety of his good humor.