As the other members of the party were, more or less, excited and ardent with the thought that the tedious journey was nearly at an end, with fame and fortune almost within their grasp (for when is fortune achieved without fame following dutifully behind the triumphal car?)—the Commissioner, with the far-off cottage ready to be illumined with the glad tidings, and the children’s shouts almost in his ears; the young men, fired with the idea of a return to England with a record rivalling that of the hero who ‘broke the bank at Monte Carlo,’—no objection was raised. And when the moon, nearly at her full, rose slowly over the horizon, commencing to flood the wide bare solitudes, the plain, the hill crags, the mighty sweep of waterless silent landscape, and deserted save for themselves, it seemed a weird mockery to expect anything of the nature of wealth won from a region so far removed from the benevolence of Nature or of man.
Leaving one of the ‘jackeroos’ (as the old man called them, apologising, however, and explaining the term) to take charge of the waggonette, the others followed the prospector for a few hundred yards until, as they came to a spot where a few stones had been carelessly thrown together, he stopped, and pointed to a stake. ‘There it is!’ he gasped; ‘no one’s been next or anigh it. I’ll go round, sir, with you and see the other ones. If Mr. Southwater’ll go back to the cart, and feed the horses, and start a fire to boil the billy, we’ll make sure that nothing’s been touched since I left here months ago. It’s not far from daylight, and after a bit of breakfast we can open up the reef, and you’ll see what sort of a show it is.’
‘Well, this is something what we went into the wilderness to see—not to be profane—but isn’t it exactly what one would have thought in the old, old days? This _is_ a wilderness, and no mistake. I used to wonder what one was like when I was at school. Now I know.’
‘Wild and bare, and open to the air,’ continued Mr. Newstead. ‘It takes a lot of imagination to think of villages, towns, cities, and so on—“in this neglected spot,” as Gray’s _Elegy_ hath it. But _gold_ rules the court, the camp, the grove, rather more strongly than t’other imperial power. Everything else follows in its train, so they tell me—Denzil and I are too young to lay down the law on these great subjects. We’ll live and learn, I surmise, as our American friend said.’