for dip, so that we must now be about three feet from the bottom.”
Next morning my mate went down first. On relieving him I had not sunk above three or four inches before, in making a vigorous blow, my pick came against something hard with such violence that for a moment I felt as if I possessed no arms at all, so benumbed were they by the shock.
“Granite boulders for a pound,” thought I. I cleared away the earth, and stooped down to look. No boulders were visible, but white cement, the very stuff which had overlain the wash-dirt everywhere in Nuggety, and had been utterly wanting in Chinaman’s and the Flat.
“Jackson,” I shouted, “send down the gads!”
“What’s up?”
“White cement.”
“Hurrah! We are on it to a certainty.”
This bit of news quite roused up the shepherds. Some crowded round Jackson, others began to trench their holes; all was impatience and anxiety. But the cement was frightfully hard. After a whole hour’s labour there was nothing to show for it but about half a bucket of white dust, and it was noon the next day before my mate cried out, “I am through—red gravel below.” And now the excitement became intense. The shepherds, whose numbers had considerably increased since the preceding day, swarmed around the mouth of the shaft, so that I could hardly work the windlass, and an anxious silence succeeded to noise and rough jokes. After about half-an-hour’s suspense, Jackson sang out to me to send down the bucket. I did so, and drew it up again, filled with gravel of a dull red. A little way up Chinaman’s was a dam belonging to a deserted puddling machine. Thither we all adjourned in a body. The dirt was well watered and stirred about until all the clay was gone, and then the gravel that remained was emptied into the wash-pan. Now came the anxious moment. All heads were thrust forward to watch. Everything was as still as death. You might have heard a pin drop. Gradually, as the water passed backwards and forwards over the face of the dirt, its bulk grew less and less, till at last something bright became visible, and in another moment the pan was adorned with a little heap of rough gold weighing some seven or eight pennyweights.
“Rush oh!” was the cry, and away went the shepherds as hard as their legs could carry them. Off went shirts and flannels—to work went pick and shovel, and before evening at least fifty were down some half-a-dozen feet and upwards.
By the next morning the news had spread far and wide, and the whole of the small scattered population still left in those parts was upon the flat as busy as bees. If we could have kept matters dark we should have all made our piles half-a-dozen times over; but, as these things always get out somehow or another, only a few days passed before diggers came crowding in from all points of the compass, and the old township on the hill by the side of the flat was soon alive again with tents and stores, grog-shops and bagatelle-rooms.
Sydney Bill did not go to Avoca, but moved down to the flat instead; and my mate and I never from that time found it necessary to wash headings or to hunt about in old holes for forgotten pillars.
OLD AND NEW FLITTINGS.
The old sarcasm of “leaving one’s country for one’s country’s good” is losing its point under the present remarkable conjuncture of circumstances. Many thousands of English men and women will soon have left their country for its good without any discredit to themselves; and it is quite plain that there will be scarcely anything more seen of that compulsory emigration which is indicated by the old sarcasm, and which we are accustomed to call Transportation.
The conjuncture of circumstances I refer to is the strange outbreak of crime of a special sort which will for ever mark the close of last year, and the singular calamity which we call the Cotton-famine. The two together will be cited hereafter as having settled the destiny of the two opposite kinds of emigration in the social system of our country.
When the citizens of London and Birmingham and Liverpool were going to and from their homes armed, and in parties, during the dark days and nights of last winter, in fear of garotters; and when we mountaineers looked to our bolts and bars and alarm-bells, and were severe with tramps, and apt to be very light sleepers for fear of ticket-of-leave men in the capacity of burglars, there was a good deal of crying out for a revival of transportation. For a little while the cry was loud; but old and experienced citizens knew that it could only make some temporary mischief, ending in an exclusion of that punishment from our system for ever. The mischief is, we may trust, mainly over already. It consisted in the diversion of the citizens’ minds from practicable and wise methods of dealing with criminals, and in the wrath it could not but excite in the colonies. Already, before the commission appointed to inquire into our system of penal servitude has delivered its report, we all find, as some of us expected, that we had sufficient ground to proceed upon, without the expense and delay of a commission; the demand for a renewal of transportation has died out; and the indignant protests returned by the colonies find us quite ready to agree with their views, and to satisfy them that they shall hear no more of any proposals to empty on their shores cargoes of crime from the mother-country.
The truths which have brought about this agreement are these. They have been stated at home during the winter, and they are now re-stated by the colonists as faithfully as by an echo, with the difference that the later voice is clearer and stronger, instead of fainter, than the earlier.
When transportation was assumed to be a successful method of punishment, the convicts were of a far milder class than our garotters and burglars. The shortest and cheapest way was taken with all who had committed serious felonies. Not only murderers, brutal assailants, and burglars were hanged, but forgers and coiners, burners
