fades for want of other means of support, and
the houses fall into rack and ruin as I have seen in Oregon, the place
resembles a disordered room seen in the morning after a gambling
debauch. The town is happy which is able to reform and live henceforth
on agriculture, as is now the case to a great extent with Ballarat and
with Sandhurst, which has discarded its famous name of Bendigo.

To a miner, or indeed to anyone in want of money, as I usually was when
knocking about in Australian or American mining districts, the one
painful thing is to know where untold quantities of gold lie without
being able to get a single pennyweight of it. I remember on more than
one occasion sitting on the banks of the Fraser River in British
Columbia, or of the Illinois River in Oregon, pondering on the absurdity
of my needing a hundred dollars when millions were in front of me under
those fast-flowing streams. Those who know nothing about gold countries
may ask how I knew there were millions there. The answer is simple
enough. First let me say a few words about one common process of mining.

When it is discovered that there is a certain quantity of gold in the
vast deposits of gravel which are found in many places along the Pacific
slope, but especially in Oregon and California, water, brought in a
"flume" or aqueduct from a higher level, is directed, by means of a pipe
and nozzle fixed on a movable stand, against the crumbling bench, which
perhaps contains only two or three shillings-worth of gold to the ton.
This is washed down into a sluice made of wooden boards, in which
"riffles," or pieces of wood, are placed to stop the metal as it flows
along in the turbid rush of water. Some amalgamated copper plates are
put in suitable places to catch the lighter gold, or else the water
which contains it is allowed to run into a more slowly-flowing aqueduct,
which gives the finer scales time to settle. This, roughly put, is the
hydraulic method of mining which causes so much trouble between the
agricultural and mining interests in California; for the finer detritus
of this washing, called technically "slickens," fills up the rivers,
causes them to overflow and deposit what is by no means a fertilising
material on the pastures of the Golden State.

Now, what man does here in a small way, and with infinite labour and
pains, Nature has been doing on a grand scale for unnumbered centuries.
Let us, for instance, take the Fraser River and its tribut