WAIKAIA.

Tuapeka Times, Volume VII, Issue 343, 1 April 1874, Page 3

WAIKAIA.

(From our aim Correspondent.) Being your own and only • correspondent from this place for several years, and having kept you well posted up in the progress of this and surrounding diggings, and the truth of my correspondence never having been qiiestioned in any case during that time, I was surprised and somewhat vexed to see in your issue of the 9th inst., a report of this place by a Mount Benger correspondent, which, to use a mild term, is highly coloured. Now, Sir, I consider it a great evil, and especially in an isolated place like this, where the miners at a distance have to depend upon reports for information, that correspondence should be unreliable. Allow me, without egotism, to state that I have always been very particular on this point ; hence my sensitiveness in the ease of your Mount Beuger correspondent ; .and I may here remark that a truthful report of these diggings is sufficiently encouraging, and requires no exaggerations. Since my last another claim (the Golden Gate) has struck good gold. Out of a small paddock the owners (Boyle and party) have taken thirty-two ounces — not so bad for a beginning. No doubt their next paddock will be much richer, as their prospects are much better in the face of this than they were in the last paddock having washed as much as four ounces to two dishes of dirt. The ground is comparatively shallow and easy to work ; it is a valuable, and I believe a pile claim. No other claim as yet is in the deep ground, as I have before promised I will notice them aR they bottom. We have had a high flood which has retarded work for a few days, but only in one case has the damage been great, with which exception all parties are progressing favourably. It is my melancholy* duty to have to chronicle the death of Roderick Stronach the sto.'kman on this (Fielding's Station) who perished in a snow storm the night of the 6th inst., on the Umbrella Ranges when on liis journey home from the Moa Flat Station. No doubt you will have had particulars by this time from another source. Poor Roderick, his loss has cast a gloom over us all, he was generally beloved for Ms agreeable and kind disposition, and the poor fellow was only just recovering from a bad accident — a broken leg, when death overtook him.