ation for the emancipation of the
miners and the doings and sayings of the insurgent party at Ballarat, and
every now and again Peetree senior would whisper ambiguously: 'There
ain't such a thing ez a drop of gin? No, of course not.'

Once Harry drew a small flask from his pocket, poured a little spirit
into a pannikin, and gave it to the old man. 'Hair off his dog, you
know,' he said. And two or three times Con made an effort to induce his
father to take a whiff of smoke, but old Peetree shook his head
disgustedly, and returned to his mutterings and the picking of imaginary
tarantulas off his sleeves.

In the morning Jim noticed that the wards 'Inebrits' Retreet' had been
printed on the barrel with pipeclay.

The good luck that had marked their initial effort on Diamond Gully
followed the mates to Jim Crow. They struck the wash-dirt in their first
claim, and Jim, in sinking through the alluvial, stuck his pick into the
largest nugget he had yet seen, a lump of rugged gold, pure and clean,
which Mike estimated to be worth four hundred pounds. It glowed in the
sunlight with the lustre of a live ember, and, gazing upon it, Done
trembled again with the vehement joy that thrills in the veins of the
least avaricious digger at the sight of such a find.

'If there's a large family o' these we're made men,' said Burton,
fondling the nugget.

'Unless some of Douglas's men take a fancy to them when we've unearthed
them.'

'Or Solo chips in an' lifts the pile. We must keep it dark till this
field sobers up a bit.'

The tub of dirt taken from the bottom of their hole--that is, the deepest
part of the strata of alluvial deposit, to which the best of the gold
almost in variably gravitates--was extremely rich. The dregs in the tub,
after all the clay and dirt had been washed away, blazed with coarse
pieces, and Done carried away at least five hundred pounds' worth in
nuggets wrapped in his gray jumper. The coarse gold was picked out of the
washed gravel, and then the remainder of the stuff was put through the
cradle, the slides of which captured and retained the smaller gold, with
a certain amount of sand, and this was washed again in the tin dish, the
last grains of base material being got rid of by shaking the gold on a
sheet of paper after it had been thoroughly dried, and blowing with the
mouth, a process at which the diggers became so expert that very little
of even the finest gold-dust was lost in the operation.

The m