the day, it was misery to be
within earshot; so much so, that we decided to leave so uncomfortable a
neighbourhood without loss of time, and carrying our tents, &c., higher
up the gully we finally pitched them not far from the Portland Stores.

This was done on Thursday, and the same evening two different claims
were marked out ready to commence working the next day. These claims
were the usual size, eight feet square.

FRIDAY, 24.--Early this morning our late travelling companion, Joe, made
his appearance with a sack (full of bran, he said,) on his shoulders.
After a little confidential talk with William, he left the sack in our
tent, as he had no other safe place to stow it away in till the bran
was sold. This gave rise to no suspicion, and in the excitement of
digging was quite forgotten.

About noon I contrived to have a damper and a large joint of baked
mutton ready for the "day labourers," as they styled themselves. The
mutton was baked in a large camp oven suspended from three iron bars,
which were fixed in the ground in the form of a triangle, about a yard
apart, and were joined together at the top, at which part the oven was
hung over a wood fire. This grand cooking machine was, of course,
outside the tent. Sometimes I have seen a joint of meat catch fire in
one of these ovens, and it is difficult to extinguish it before the fat
has burnt itself away, when the meat looks like a cinder.

Our butcher would not let us have less than half a sheep at a time, for
which we paid 8s. I was not good housekeeper enough to know how much it
weighed, but the meat was very good. Flour was then a shilling a pound,
or two hundred pounds weight for nine pounds in money. Sugar was 1s.
6d., and tea 3s. 6d. Fortunately we were Well provided with these three
latter articles.

The hungry diggers did ample justice to the dinner I had provided for
them. They brought home a tin-dish full of surface soil, which in
the course of the afternoon I attempted to wash.

Tin-dish-washing is difficult to describe. It requires a watchful eye
and a skilful hand; it is the most mysterious department of the
gold-digging business. The tin dish (which, of course, is round) is
generally about eighteen inches across the top, and twelve across the
bottom, with sloping sides of three or four inches deep. The one I used
was rather smaller. Into it I placed about half the "dirt"--digger's
technical term for earth, or soil--that they had brought, fille