ver Island, or in New Caledonia, as the
mainland was named? If there had been gold, would not the company have
found it? Finlayson probably thought the easiest way to get rid of the
unwelcome visitors was to let them go on into the dangers of the wilds
and then spread the news of the disappointment bound to be theirs.

He handled their nuggets doubtfully. Who knew for a certainty that it
was gold anyhow? {3} They bade him lay it on the smith's anvil and
strike it with a hammer. Finlayson, smiling sceptically, did as he was
told. The nuggets flattened to a yellow leaf as fine and flexible as
silk. Finlayson took the nuggets at eleven dollars an ounce and sent
the gold down to San Francisco, very doubtful what the real value would
prove. It proved sixteen dollars to the ounce.

For seven or eight years afterwards rumours kept floating in to the
company's forts of finds of gold. Many of the company's servants
drifted away to California in the wake of the 'Forty-Niners,' and the
company found it hard to keep its trappers from deserting all up and
down the Pacific Coast. The quest for gold had become a sort of
yellow-fever madness. Men flung certainty to the winds and trekked
recklessly to California, to Oregon, to the hinterland of the country
round Colville and Okanagan. Yet nothing occurred to cause any
excitement in Victoria. There was a short-lived flurry over the
discovery in Queen Charlotte Islands of a nugget valued at six hundred
dollars and a vein of gold-bearing quartz. But the nugget was an
isolated freak; the quartz could not be worked at a profit; and the
movement suddenly died out. {4} There were, however, signs of what was
to follow. The chief trader at the little fur-post of Yale reported
that when he rinsed sand round in his camp frying-pan, fine flakes and
scales of yellow could be seen at the bottom.[1] But gold in such
minute particles would not satisfy the men who were hunting nuggets.
It required treatment by quicksilver. Though Maclean, the chief factor
at Kamloops, kept all the specks and flakes brought to his post as
samples from 1852 to 1856, he had less than would fill a half-pint
bottle. If a half-pint is counted as a half-pound and the gold at the
company's price of eleven dollars an ounce, it will be seen why four
years of such discoveries did not set Victoria on fire.

It has been so with every discovery of gold in the history of the
world. The silent, shaggy, ragged first