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 album) 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." 



