On the Gold-Diggings.

Roberts came of Scottish Highland ancestry an Inverness family. He was born in India and came to Auckland as a boy of fifteen, in 1855.

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The first eight years of his life in the colony were spent in bush and farming life, on the edge of the great Hunua forest, which extended south and east from Papakura for many a league. He and his widowed mother lived in the homestead of his uncle, Major Clare, and he did his share in all the work of a pioneer settler. In 1861 he and a mate from the Wairoa were attracted by the reports of the wonderful gold-finds in Otago, and they sailed off with a party of other young adventurers, in a small schooner from Auckland. She was a rough little craft, that schooner, Roberts narrated, with a rough crowd of passengers. Fights were frequent, and at last the skipper told the quarrelsome hard-cases that they would have to settle their arguments on shore. He put into an East Coast bay and anchored, and sent a boat on shore with the pugilists, to punch each other on the beach. This suited all hands; the various fist affairs were disposed of happily on firm land, and the voyage was resumed. Dunedin was reached at last, by good luck, and the two partners carried their swags into the Promised Land of gold. No luck there; they dug and panned out at Gabriel's Gully and other fields, but obtained very little reward for all their pains and travels. Back to Auckland they sailed presently, with very little in their pockets but an excellent stock of experience. “Well,” said the veteran, when he told the story nearly sixty years afterwards, “if we didn't make our pile on the diggings, we certainly learned self-reliance.”