k or reef
from which the gold was washed out. If he doesn't know his geology,
he's apt to waste his time.

"Then the scientific expert and the capitalist come in. It's the man
with money who profits most by a poor man's strike. He can afford to
sit back and wait. Presently the expert will come back and report
where the gold-bearing rock lies. The capitalist arrives with huge
machinery for mining and crushing the rock, for turning on enormous
water-power, in short, for performing a sort of artificial erosion in
a few days which Nature took hundreds of thousands of years to do. He
pockets millions, where the prospectors who did the first work only
get thousands, or even hundreds, or, sometimes, nothing at all.

"Your father was perfectly right, Jim, in saying that the prizes of
prospecting are for the man who gets there first. Placers are bound to
peter out quickly. They are Nature's purses, and a purse hasn't any
more money in it than you put in. Even the Klondyke, that astounding
pocket of riches, lasted only three years and then dwindled down.

"Some of these days, all the available places of the earth will have
been worked over by the casual prospector, and then his day will be
done. The ever-hoping rover of the pick, shovel, and pan is becoming
extinct. Even now, the only spots which hold out any chance of pockets
of gold are in the almost inaccessible section of the globe.

"The daring seeker for gold must go to the bleak ranges of the frigid
North, where, even in the middle of the summer, the ground is frozen
as hard as a rock a few inches below the surface; or else to the
jungle-clad slopes of the tropics, where fever and stewing heat menace
him with ever-present death; or yet to regions so far removed from
civilization that the white man has not yet penetrated there. The
shores of the Arctic Ocean, the steaming equatorial forests of the
Eastern Andes, or the untrodden valleys of the inner Himalayas offer
the most hopes to the prospector. But he may spend all the gold-dust
he finds, and more, to go there and return.

"The tundras of Alaska and eastward to Hudson Bay still contain placer
gold, to a surety, gold not difficult to find if a man is willing to
face an Arctic winter and a mosquito-haunted summer to work there.
It's a wonder to me, Jim, that your father didn't join the great rush
to the Fraser River, in British Columbia, in 1856. That was a mad and
sorrowful stampede, if ever there was one!"

"He w