Our Yellow Slave by Charles Fletcher Lummis

The only metal in the world that is yellow is the most precious of them all-gold. Brass is not a metal, but an alloy, a compound. And the color which gold shares with the sun has a great deal to do with its value. I do not suppose it would be possible that we should ever have come to love and admire any metal so much as to choose it for our highest currency and our ornaments, no matter how rare or ductile it might be, if it were of a dark, dull, gloomy color. The human eye never gets too old to be pleased with very much the same things which pleased it in childhood; and no eye is insensible to that precious yellow.

I like sometimes to think back to the first man of all men that ever held that rock of the sun in his savage hand, and to imagine how he found it, and how it made his sharp eyes twinkle, and how he wondered at its weight, and pounded it with one smooth rock upon another and found he could flatten it. All these things come by accident, and gold was an accident that befell when the world was very young. No doubt there had been a great rain, that washed the heavy lump from its nest in some gravelly stream bank, and the prehistoric man, in his tunic of skins, chanced that way and found it. Mayhap it was the very rain of the Flood itself, and the poor barbarian who picked up the yellow nugget sank with it still in his swarthy fist.