which he had chosen, and which he was beginning to love as he became better acquainted with its intricacies and the possibilities that it offered.
But the golden dreams haunted him night and day, at work and at leisure. He scanned the newspapers for reports from Australia. The favourable reports sank deep into his mind; the reports of hardships and terrible deaths seemed to fade away as soon as he had read them. He argued, as hundreds and thousands had argued before and since, that, if fortune came to others, it was just as likely to come to him. He was a cheery, optimistic man all his life. He never took the gloomy view. He could not do so, in fact, and to the end of his days was looking forward with the hope and the certainty of getting something done. “My greatest interest,” he said once, “lies in the to-days and the to-morrows, not in the yesterdays, with which I have done.”
So he heard the Golden South calling to him; and, bidding friends and relatives “good-bye,” he stepped on board the “Star of England,” a handsome young man, fair in complexion, upright in carriage, and strong in build.
His capital consisted of a Board of Trade engineer’s certificate, a pair of broad shoulders, a steady purpose, a determination to succeed, and a stout heart. These friends stood by him through life. It is to them that he owed a great deal of the credit for the things he did in the new land to which Fate was leading him, but which at that time had no place in his thoughts. He went to search for gold, but he was denied success in that direction in order that he might gain that which gold could not give.
At that time, however, it would have been impossible to shake the conviction in his mind that gold was waiting for him to pick it up from the Victorian goldfields.
Soon after he landed in Melbourne, therefore, he set out for the diggings. There he was quickly disillusioned. The paths were not strewn with nuggets. There were no paths at all, and nuggets gave very few signs of being more plentiful than at old Eccleston in the England he had left. He worked hard and searched diligently; but in vain. He found himself poorer
