HOW to FIND QUARTZ-REEFS.

Westport Times, Volume III, Issue 560, 28 September 1869, Page 3

HOW to FIND QUARTZ-REEFS.

A humorous correspondent of the Hokitika Star writes : —A good crop of smart sharebrokers is worth a hundred reefs for getting up a rush. I was in the sharebroking business myself in a neighboring province. A sharebroker, who died in Bendigo, bequeathed me five specimens, stating in his will that, put to honest use, they were worth more than the Ivohinoor. As soon as I got the specimens I came to New Zealand and showed them to several parties on a goldfield, and got up a mania in no time. Of course, sharebrokers came up to see what was to be done. One of these gentlemen, whose name I don't know, asked one day if I had got any stone out of my reef. I said I had knocked off a few pieces from a leader, and, showed hi m the specimens. He immediately grasped my hand, and fairly shaking with excitement, said, " My boy, the best pieces of quartz in the Australian colonies. To my knowledge, with their aid, thirty-seven companies in Victoria, fourteen in New South "Wales, and seventeen in Queensland, besides others I may not have heard of, have been got up. It is just fifteen years since I saw them first in Bendigo. What will you take for them ?" I replied that I didn't care about parting with them. My friend sighed deeply, and, as he turned away to hide a failing tear, remarked in broken accents, " I have been looking after these specimens for five years; the last I heard of them was near Port Curtis." A few weeks after this I deemed it advisable to leave the place, not on account of the reef dipping considerably, and the inability of the miners working in the shaft to find where it commenced to dip, but because I wished to visit a friend in Victoria. I then sold the specimens to the gentleman who coveted them. He remarked, as we parted," I'm going to make a pile up North." He went to Auckland. Three weeks after he landed there a rush set in.