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and soul together.' So he went up to our old place, and kept himself in tucker. A few days after he had been at work, he found that the farther down he dug in one direction the more gold the soil yielded. At one end of the ground a reef cropped up, shelving inward very much. He quickly saw that against the reef, toward which the gold-yielding gravel lay, the ground sloping downward toward the bottom must be still richer. He got excited, threw aside the gravel with his shovel to come at the real treasure he expected to find. Down he went till he reached the slope of the reef, where the gravel lay up against it. There, in the corner of the ground, right in the angle of the juncture, as it were, lay the rich glistening gold, all in pure particles, mixed with earth and pebbles. He filled his tin dish with the precious mixture, bore it aloft, and brought it down to our tent, where, aided by the mates, he washed off the dirt, and obtained as the product of his various washings about 1000 ounces of pure gold! The diggers who were camped about in the gully being a rough lot, we were afraid to let them know any thing of the prize that had been found. So, without saying any thing, two of us, late one night, set out with the lucky man and his fortune to the nearest township, where he sold his gold and set out immediately for England, where, I believe, he is now. He left us the remainder of his dirt, which he did not think any thing of compared with what he had got, and three of us obtained from it the value of £600, or £200 a man."

The same digger at another time related to us how and when he had found his first nugget. He declared that it was all through a dream. "I dreamt," he said,

"that I sunk a shaft down by the side of a pretty creek, just under a gum-tree, and close to the water; that I worked down about 10 feet there, put in a drive, and, while I was working, chanced to look up, and there, sticking in the pipe-clay, was a piece of gold as big as my fist. Such was my dream. It took complete possession of me. I could think of nothing else. Some weeks after, I selected just such a site for a shaft as that I had dreamt of, under a gum-tree, close by a creek; and there, new chum-like, I put in the drive at the wrong depth. But one day, when I had got quite sick at fruitlessly working in the hole, on accidentally looking up, sure enough, there was my nugget sticking up in the pipe-clay, just as I had dreamt of it. I took out the gold, sat with it in my hand, and thought the thing over, but couldn't make it out at all."

CHAPTER XV.

ROUGH LIFE AT THE DIGGINGS" STOP THIEF!"

Gold-rushing.--Diggers' Camp at Havelock.--Murder of Lopez.--Pursuit and Capture of the Murderer.---The Thieves hunted from the Camp. --Death of the Murderer.-The Police.-Attempted Robbery of the Collingwood Bank. -- Another supposed Robbery. "Stop Thief!". Smart Use of the Telegraph.

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In the times of the early rushes to the goldfields there was, as might be expected, a good deal of disorder and lawlessness. When the rumor of a new goldfield went abroad, its richness was, as usual, exaggerated in proportion to the distance it traveled, and men of all classes rushed from far and near to the new diggings. Melbourne was half emptied of its laboring population; sailors deserted their ships; shepherds left their flocks, and stockmen their cattle; and, worst of all, there also came pouring into Victoria the looser part of the convict population of the adjoining colonies. These all flocked to the last discovered field, which was invariably reputed the richest that had yet been discovered.

Money was rapidly made by some where gold was found in any abundance; but when the soil proved comparatively poor, the crowd soon dispersed in search of other diggings. A population so suddenly drawn together by the fierce love of gain, and containing so large an admixture of the desperado element, could scarcely be expected to be very orderly, yet it is astonishing how

soon, after the first rush was over, the camp would settle down into a state of comparative order and peaceableness; for it was always the interest of the majority to put down plundering and disorder. Their first concern was for the security of their lives, and their next for the security of the gold they were able to scrape together.

When the lawless men about a camp were numerous, and robberies became frequent, the diggers would suddenly extemporize a police, rout out the thieves, and drive them perforce from the camp. I may illustrate this early state of things by what occurred at Havelock, a place about seven miles from Majorca. The gully there was "rushed" about nine years since, when some twenty thousand diggers were drawn together, with even more than the usual proportion of grog-shanty keepers, loafers, thieves, and low men and women of every description. In fact, the very scum of the roving population of the colony seems to have accumulated in the camp, and crime upon crime was committed, until at length an affair occurred, more dreadful and outrageous than any thing that had preceded it, which thoroughly roused the digger population, and a rising took place, which ended in their hunting the whole of the thieves and scoundrels into the bush.

The affair has been related to me by three of the persons who were themselves actors in it, and it is briefly as follows: At the corner of one of the main thoroughfares of the camp, composed of canvas tents and wooden stores, there stood an extemporized restaurant, kept by a Spaniard named Lopez. A few yards from his place was a store occupied by a Mr. S―, now a storekeeper in Majorca, and a customer at our bank. Opposite to S―'s

store stood a tent, the occupants of which were known to be among the most lawless ruffians in the camp. S― had seen the men more than once watching his store, and he had formed the conviction that they meant at some convenient opportunity to rob him, so he never slept without a loaded revolver under his pillow. One night in particular he was very anxious. The men stood about at the front of his store near closing-time, suspiciously eying his premises, as he thought. So he put a bold face on, came to the door near where they were standing, discharged his pistol in the air—a regular custom in the diggings at night-reloaded, entered his store, and bolted himself in. He went to bed at about ten o'clock, and lay awake listening, for he could not sleep. It was not very long before he heard some person's steps close by his hut, and a muttering of smothered voices. The steps passed on; and then, after the lapse of about ten minutes, he heard a shot--a scream and hurried footsteps running close past his hut. He lay in bed, determined not to go out, as he feared that this was only a ruse on the part of the thieves to induce him to open his door. But soon he heard shouts outside as of persons in pursuit of some one, and, jumping out of bed, he ran out half dressed and joined in the chase.

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Now this is what had happened during the ten minutes that he had lain in bed listening. The thieves had stolen past his store, as he had heard them, and gone forward to the restaurant kept by the Spaniard. They looked into the bar, and through the chinks of the wood they saw Lopez counting over the money he had taken during the day. The bar was closed, but the men knocked at the door for admission. Lopez asked what they wanted;

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