‘Seventy-five feet hard delving, and not a colour!’
The speakers were myself, the teller of this story, and my mate, Harry Treloar.
We were sitting on a heap of earth and stones representing a month’s fruitless, dreary labour. The last remark was Harry’s.
‘That makes, I think,’ continued he, ‘as nearly as I can guess, about a dozen of the same species. And people have the cheek to call this a poor man’s diggings!’
‘The prospectors are on good gold,’ I hazard.
‘So are the publicans,’ retorts he, ‘and the speculators, and the storekeepers, and, apparently, everybody but the poor men—ourselves, to wit. This place is evidently for capitalists. We’re nearly “dead-brokers,” as they say out here. Let’s harness up Eclipse and go over to old Yamnibar. We may make a rise there. It’s undignified, I allow, scratching amongst the leavings of other men and other years; dangerous, also, but that’s nothing. And many a good man has had to do the same before us.’
No life can equal that of a digger’s if he be ‘on gold,’ [72] ]even moderately so; if not, none so weary and heart-breaking
.
It’s all very well to talk, as some street-bred novelists do, of ‘hope following every stroke of the pick, making the heaviest toil as nought,’ and all that kind of thing; but when one has been pick-stroking for months without seeing a colour; when one’s boots are sticking together by suasion of string or greenhide; when every meal is eaten on grudged credit; when one works late and early, wet and dry, and all in vain, then hope becomes of that description which maketh the heart sick, very sick, indeed. Treloar was, in general, a regular Mark Tapley and Micawber rolled into one. But for once, fate, so adverse, had proved too much for even his serenely hopeful temper.
He was an Anglo-Indian. Now he is Assistant Commissioner at Bhurtpore, also a C.S.I.; and, when he reads this, will recollect and perhaps sigh for the days when he possessed a liver and an appetite, and was penniless.