four feet on solid ground I was again on his back. I cut a switch from a bush and drove the horse back, and then first my mate, and next the "special commissioner" for the Sydney Morning Herald, who had been in the coach with us, going up to report on the new El Dorado, crossed in safety. With the aid of the stirrup-leathers we got our three kits pannier-fashion across the horse, and drove him in front of us to the new field, ankle-deep nearly all the way in mud. A few rough buildings had been put up along the course of a creek, which came down from the range of hills towering above, and entered the township right at the foot of a valley. We quartered at one of the hotels, and the next morning, the weather being simply delightful, we traversed the ranges. The alluvial at many points along the bed of the creek and in the gullies had been tried, and found to be 66 a duffer;" but several quartz reefs had been discovered, rich with the precious metal. The original prospectors, three in number, had gone out there twelve months before, with a gun and ammunition, a supply of flour, a tent, a billy-can, etc. Their provisions got exhausted, but they kept up their spirits and worked on until they cut a quartz lode by trenching. For a month or two they had had to live on the opossums and birds they shot, but they had their reward, for, unlike most pioneers of a goldfield, they dropped on the richest claim of all. "dollied" the best of the stone with a rude pestle and mortar, and then with saplings and a few other things, chiefly of Nature's providing, they constructed a primitive battery of two heads. So they got together fifty ounces of gold, and sent one of the party away to turn it into coin, and bring back what they required, meantime, of course, securing the ground. Soon the find got wind, and when my mate and I reached the place there might have been about 300 men scattered over the hills. There was a ten-head public crushing battery, and another five-head one was going up, but it was a terrible job to get the stone up perhaps one very steep incline, and then down another even more difficult slope. One party, known as the "Hidden Treasure," had cut a rich First they 245 a three-feet lode, but before they could It was while our stone was being been robbed in one fortnight of over £4000, and the only good he appeared to have done at any time with his money was when he sent £1000 home to each of two maiden sisters in England. That was the last time he had been lucky, and he told a peculiar tale about it. Not more than a week after he had sent off the drafts, he changed the last pound he had in the world, and not only did not know where to get enough to start again with, but even did not know where to go to start. One night he went home to his lodgings in Elizabeth Street very down in the mouth, and began looking over the things he had in his box to see what he could sell. To his amazement he found two prettily-shaped nuggets, one of seven ounces and the other of a little over five ounces. Then it flashed like lightning over his mind that eight months before he had put these nuggets away for those maiden sisters to whom he had sent the money. He said, "I had two stiff brandies straight away on the strength of that find, and then more before I turned in, but the next afternoon I was in the coach for Mount Alexander, and I have managed to rub along ever since and put a little away. But I'll tell you one thing, old chum. When I was a lucky digger I used to drink fearfully, but from the day I found the two nuggets it seemed so like a God-sent gift-for I had forgotten all about it, I suppose I was drunk at the time-that I determined I would drink no more for the rest of my life, and for the last ten years and more I have kept my word." It was then, too, he told me a little of his early life, with all its romance and its brief period of tranquil joy, followed by subsequent long years of sadness and unrest. He was the son of a solicitor in good practice in London, and was articled to his father's firm, and would doubtless have been admitted into partnership. But things were not so to be. In the course of business he met a young lady who to him was an angel. Both her parents were dead, and it was all along expected that she would have inherited a large fortune, but her father had married a second time, and when the will came to be read it was found that, except a few hundreds, everything was left to the second wife. It was on this discovery that my mate pressed his suit, and eventually persuaded her to marry him quietly and unknown to his family. They lived for more than a year in sublime happiness. Then his father became aware of the mésalliance, as he chose to call it, and stopped the allow ance-an unusually liberal one—he had hitherto made. But his saint wife, as he called her, did not live to know what existence in straitened circumstances is; for a week or two afterwards she died in giving birth to a child, which only survived the mother a few hours. Within two days of the double funeral this mate of mine had taken ship for Victoria. His own death was romantic, and possibly this is the fitting place to record the cir cumstances. It was several years after he and I parted that he with another mate was travelling in New South Wales, and near the junction of the Murrumbidgee with some other river they were crossing in a punt, which somehow capsized in mid-stream. My mate was an expert swimmer, but his companion could not swim a stroke; yet the former held him up with one hand by his hair, and so rescued him, but at the expense of his own life. The companion caught hold of a bush, and reached the bank safely, and then my poor mate made a grasp at another bush and caught it, but it gave way in his hand, and he sank to rise no more. The river, I believe, was full of "snags " about the scene of the sad fatality, and probably he got entangled in one of these and could not extricate himself. To the present moment, and it is now more than twenty years since the accident happened, I never think of poor Jim Lister without shedding a silent tear, for he was just one of those noblehearted fellows that, under favourable auspices, would have developed into a sincere philanthropist. It was the loss of his young wife that made him the wandering, reckless dare-devil and spendthrift he was for many years. It was about eight o'clock in the morning when we got our crushing finished, and when we opened the boxes we could see at a glance that it was at least payable. To make a long story short, we got an average of eighteen pennyweights to the ton, which paid us fairly well, for the stone was plentiful and easily got out. By far the greater part of the gold was contained in the boxes, and this led us to try the tailings, because there should have been more on the plates and in the ripples. Well, we got good prospects from the refuse sand, but we could do nothing, for the battery altogether was a rattletrap concern, and the unsteadiness of the engine made things worse. It was one of those old portable engines that I imagined must have travelled with a threshing machine for many years. After this our yields were varying, and we put down a shaft to cut the reef in the underlie. We sank sixty feet, and were just about to open out, when one day three men, undoubtedly speculators, came up to us and asked us what we would take for our claim. I asked £1000 at first, but after a good deal of haggling we came down to £650. The money was paid in sovereigns, the transfer signed, and off my mate and I started, each with about £450 in his pockets. At Hill End, a quartz-reefing place in the Tambaroora district, I spent some considerable time. As early as 1857 a little quartz-mining had been done, and Rowley's reef on the brow of Hawkins' Hill had paid well in patches. By 1869 the Hill and its vicinity shared increased activity. Suddenly in Rawsthorne's claim a crushing was taken out of twenty tons, which gave sixty-three ounces to the ton, and then, of course, a rush unprecedented in the mining annals of New South Wales set in. No field in the world of its size perhaps yielded so much gold in such a short space of time as did Hawkins' Mill. It is almost incredible now-a-days to learn that Krohman's company, out of one crushing, had a cake of 24,000 ounces of gold, which was shown at the Exhibition of 1871; that thirty tons of stone gave a return of 3500 ounces; that a result of three months' work was 5673 ounces; and that Beyer and Holterman's claim gave 15,000 ounces for a like period. Yet these are facts beyond question that occurred about 1870, and up to 1873 the yield was simply phenomenal. In one claim, which was afterwards, and possibly is still, known as the Star of Peace, 9368 tons of stone were crushed for a total of 17,816 ounces of gold. At the time I went to Hill End things were pretty lively, and I had to give £250 for a twentieth interest in a co-operative party, which had just struck Paxton's vein, as it was called, at the 200 feet level. We followed that down to 340 feet in the underlie without getting much gold, barely enough indeed to allow us to clear expenses and declare small dividends; but we struggled on, and in the course of a few weeks more came upon a "blow" from which, in less than three months, we took 1500 ounces of the precious metal, principally got by "nuggeting"-not more than 200 tons of stone having been sent to the battery. It was here that I met a former schoolfellow of my own in the old country. He was, like me, a working shareholder, and one day I took my old schoolfellow's ad- the "blazing" for a little, and we thoughtlessly followed the track without looking out for the tree-marks, until night began to come on, and we stopped to halt and consider. Allowing that we had walked at the rate of three and a half miles an hour, we must have travelled not less than ten miles since we had struck the timber, and we then observed for the first time the absence of blazing on the trees. There was nothing for it but to camp for the night, but we began to dread the want of water, for we had not more than a pint-bottle barely full. There was no tea that night, though we lit a fire for warmth, and even of the tucker we had we ate sparingly, and the water we only sipped in tea-spoon quantities. When daylight broke we consulted, and finally agreed that it would be most advisable to follow the track we were on, which we thought must certainly lead to some habitation. After a light breakfast we shouldered our swags and trudged on, and some four miles further ahead we came to a deserted gully, with some eight or ten shallow holes. Evidently a prospecting party had been there years before, and they had left, luckily for us, a windlass, and rope, and bucket. With these my mate lowered me down, and from the water in the bottom which, stinking as it was, we were glad to get, we filled our bottles and had a good draught each, and then started to follow the track back. But once again we got "bushed." At a point in the track we were following, another track came in, or rather we reached a point where there were two tracks, and we knew not which to take, finally throwing up a coin, "heads for the right, tails for the left." "Tails" showed uppermost, and to the left we went, on and on all the day, watching closely for a "blazed " Late in the afternoon we were fairly bewildered, and by no means easy in mind, for we had not half a cup of water remaining, and only a few crusts of very hard bread. There was nothing for it but again to camp for the night, but before doing so my mate succeeded in knocking down with a stick a couple of laughing-jackasses, which we threw into the red ashes, feathers and all, and made one of the most enjoyable meals either of us ever tree. had. A little to the right of us I noticed there was a small narrow valley running down to flatter ground, and there I went and followed it down till I came on greener patches indicating moisture, and so I searched and searched, turning over the grass and weeds with my hands, till at last I got a few drops. I then with my knife dug a little hole down to a gravelly bed, and opened up the ground at an acute angle above in very small channels, and so succeeded, pressing the water out of the earth, in getting in the course of an hour about three-quarters of a pint, and I knew there would be more there in the morning. We made ourselves as comfortable as we could for the night, and next morning, after filling our bottles from the hole, harked back to the point where the two tracks met and took the other, which we followed until we saw the blazed trees, and there our dangers and difficulties ended for the time. By dusk we were at the new rush, if rush it could be called, where there were only about thirty miners on the ground. It was on the highest of four little hills, which stood about equidistant from each other, east and west, that the diggings had broken out. Not far from the top of this hill, which might have been perhaps 300 feet high, there was the outcrop of a large quartz reef, and a few feet lower down the not very steep side of that hill a run of washdirt had commenced, thin, narrow, and shallow at first, but getting thicker, wider, and deeper rapidly, as it went down. The original prospectors had got quite a nest of nuggets in the uppermost part of the washdirt, chiefly above and in the midst of a bar of clay. Three or four other claims lower down had also got on to good gold, but not so nuggety or in such quantities as higher up. We took up ground near the bottom of the hill, and as all the claims were troubled with water, we decided to put in a tunnel, in the belief that the then discovered run and others to be discovered would fall into a heavy wash, as I had noticed in a similar formation at Sago Hill and Bunker's Hill, near Haddon, in Victoria. We ran in our tunnel with a good incline, and had to timber heavily all the way. |