APPENDIX C 567 



becoming at each trip more stained with rain and marked with mud. It is 

 now filled with potatoes another downward stage and forwarded to 

 Auckland. By this time ragged, rent, disreputable, with senses blunted 

 in regard to weed-carriage, it may reach some struggling settler's little home 

 in the roadless north ; there, with no pride left, it will cover a bee-hive, roof 

 a leaky hen-coop, or in a buggy act as mat for dirty boots. Lastly, the 

 poor creature takes to drink, and hangs in a besotted state about a native 

 settlement. There, utterly degraded, it may serve as a saddle-cloth to some 

 galled Maori hack, and ultimately dropped, hatch out some long-secreted 

 weed, that like a wicked action comes to light at last. It is not very often 

 that a stowaway is thus caught red-handed emerging from his hiding- 

 place; yet white goose-foot (Chenopodium alburn) was seized by me in the 

 very act, a magnificent specimen, his great roots embedded in a rotten 

 sack, one of many strewn about the site of a Maori drainer's camp." 



