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162
NOTES ON NEW ZEALAND.
premium; but for any inexperienced man to go mining or speculating in the hope of meeting with such chances as these is simple folly. As a rule the great majority of those who join in a gold rush are men who, up to that time, have been following widely different pursuits, and the man who invariably comes best out of the enterprise is he who does not abandon his original calling in order to engage in an occupation which he knows nothing about, but who succeeds in setting up the first store or grog shanty upon the gold field. He it is into whose pocket eventually flows the greater portion of all the gold that is
