lly with some forty or
fifty other miners. It was a little quiet place, a long way from any
township. We had been working some shallow ground; but as the
wash-dirt when reached only yielded about three-quarters of a
pennyweight (about 3_s._) to the dish, we got sick of it, left our
claim, and went to take up another not far off. About a day or two
after we had settled upon our new ground an old acquaintance of mine
looked in upon us by chance. He was hard up--very hard up--and wanted
to know whether we could give him anything to do. 'Well, there is our
old place up there,' said I, 'it is not much good, but you can find
enough to keep body 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 further down he dug in one direction the more
gold the soil yielded. At one end of the ground a reef cropped up,
shelving inwards very much. He quickly saw that against the reef,
towards which the gold-yielding gravel lay, the ground sloping
downwards towards 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 anything of
the prize that had been found. So, without saying anything, 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 anything of, compared with what he had
got; and three of us obtained from it the value of 600_l._, or 200_l._
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 wate