Page:Through South Westland.djvu/109

like a large mosaic in a kind of trough, over which the débris is raked after a fresh portion of the hill has been sluiced. The fine mud settles, and about once a fortnight they lift the blocks and wash the silt. That day they had taken out £64 worth of gold. With a scrub-brush and an old fire-shovel—or was it a dustpan?—the foreman lifted some mud and proceeded to “wash” it in a battered old tin-basin. And presently he laid upon my palm several little yellow discs. They were quite thin and round, and varied from the size of a pin-head to a threepenny bit. I gazed at them wonderingly—so unlike what I expected. That’s glacier gold,” said he, “we don’t know where the reef it came from was, but it was somewhere up there in the mountains. It’s been squeezed and flattened right enough in the ice, and carried down till it got buried in these old moraines.” He told me most of these steep foot-hills were old moraine—and another odd thing was, that they often find a bullet when they are washing! How it gets there, when there have been so few people to shoot seems a mystery. Geologists tell us the Southern Alps are but half as high as in the age when the great ice-cap covered these islands, and that our present glaciers are but the shrinking remains of those vanished ones which wore down these hills, and gouged out these valleys. It is a long story since these little yellow discs got scraped up by the ice-plough, and carried along till they were melted out in this old moraine. A very long

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