Read "The Hillyars and the Burtons" by Henry Kingsley online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
ABOUT a fortnight after this the most astonishing accounts from Bendigo appeared in both the Sentinel and the Mohawk. Three tons of gold had been taken down to Melbourne by the fortnightly escort, and two tons remained in camp for want of carriage. But this, according to the Mohawk, was nothing at all to Lake Omeo, in the Australian Alps. In an article in which Malachi's collar was duly thrown in the teeth of the low-browed Saxon, the gold-fields of Lake Omeo were allowed to surpass the auriferous deposits of the Wicklow mountains, in their palmy times, before trade was paralyzed, and enterprise was checked, by the arrival of the beastly Dutchman. And really the most astonishing reports of this place seemed to have reached Melbourne from various quarters. The black sand, containing small emeralds and rubies, would yield sixty per cent of pure tin: it was ten and twelve feet thick, and at the bottom of it, in the crannies of the rock, a pound weight of gold had been washed out of a panful. I was still thinking of these extraordinary accounts when Erne came slinging along the road and jumped off his horse at my side.
I thought he had come over to see the works, which were now progressing nobly, but he soon undeceived me.