dreary place, dreary even for an
abandoned goldfield. The poor, tortured earth, with its wounds all bare,
seemed to make a mute appeal to the surrounding bush to come up and
hide it, and, as if in answer to its appeal, the shrub and saplings were
beginning to close in from the foot of the range. The wilderness was
reclaiming its own again.

The two dark, sullen hills that stood on each side were clothed from tip
to hollow with dark scrub and scraggy box-trees; but above the highest
row of shafts on one side ran a line of wattle-trees in full bloom.

The top of the western hill was shaped somewhat like a saddle, and
standing high above the eucalypti on the point corresponding with the
pommel were three tall pines. These lonely trees, seen for many miles
around, had caught the yellow rays of many a setting sun long before the
white man wandered over the ranges.

The predominant note of the scene was a painful sense of listening, that
never seemed to lose its tension--a listening as though for the
sounds of digger life, sounds that had gone and left a void that was
accentuated by the signs of a former presence. The main army of diggers
had long ago vanished to new rushes, leaving only its stragglers and
deserters behind. These were men who were too poor to drag families
about, men who were old and feeble, and men who had lost their faith in
fortune. They had dropped unnoticed out of the ranks; and remained to
scratch out a living among the abandoned claims.

Golden Gully had its little community of fossickers who lived in a
clearing called Spencer's Flat on one side and Pounding Flat on the
other, but they lent no life to the scene; they only haunted it. A
stranger might have thought the field entirely deserted until he came on
a coat and a billy at the foot of saplings amongst the holes, and heard,
in the shallow ground underneath, the thud of a pick, which told of some
fossicker below rooting out what little wash remained.

One afternoon towards Christmas, a windlass was erected over an old
shaft of considerable depth at the foot of the gully. A greenhide bucket
attached to a rope on the windlass was lying next morning near the mouth
of the shaft, and beside it, on a clear-swept patch, was a little mound
of cool wet wash-dirt.

A clump of saplings near at hand threw a shade over part of the mullock
heap, and in this shade, seated on an old coat, was a small boy of
eleven or twelve years, writing on a slate.

He