yourselves. Never
mind about your work for the rest of the day, come and look at your
fortunes; it is not every day that you will see such a sight, I give you
my word."

Well, of course, you will guess that we did not need a second
invitation. There were we, five men cast away upon an uncharted island
in mid-Pacific, far from all the usual ship tracks; our hopes of rescue
consisting in the possibility that we might be taken off, sooner or
later, by a stray whaler, or, failing that, of effecting our escape
eventually in a craft to be built by ourselves--provided that we should
prove possessed of the requisite skill to build her out of the materials
at our disposal. At that moment, and under those circumstances, gold
was just about as valueless to us as the pebbles on the beach; yet such
is the magic of the word that no sooner was gold mentioned than we all
incontinently dropped our tools, and, quite forgetting that it might be
our fate never to escape at all from the island, eagerly followed
Cunningham, consumed with impatience to view this wonderful find of his.

And wonderful, in truth, it was. The way to it was through what
Cunningham had aptly described as a cleft, the outer extremity of which
was in the face of the cliff, so completely concealed from the beach by
a clump of bushes that it might never have been discovered, except by
the merest accident. The cleft was exceedingly tortuous as to
direction, narrow, so low that in places it was necessary to go down
upon hands and knees to effect a passage, full of awkward and unexpected
projections, rough and uneven of floor, with here and there little pools
of water which had dripped from the roof and sides. We traversed about
a mile of this, and then suddenly emerged into a great, shapeless hollow
in what appeared to be a wide stratum of stiff brown clay, sandwiched
between two almost vertical layers of sandstone, which seemed to have
been turned over during some tremendous natural convulsion, perhaps when
the island was hove up above the surface of the sea. And what
Cunningham had said respecting the abundance of gold was strictly and
literally true: the nuggets were as thickly arranged, proportionately,
as raisins in a Christmas pudding; there were hundreds of them in sight,
singly, at distances apart of not much more than a foot, and in little
groups of half a dozen or more, almost touching each other. Within two
minutes I dug out, with my fingers only, a