excellent fish, flesh, or fowl to eat, we need
not have provided ourselves with provender
of any kind from Halifax. As if to prove the
plenty within, there stood at the door a group
of half a dozen sportsmen, all miners or other
labourers, who had been out in the woods
to kill game, and who had returned, each with
a goodly display of partridges—one man with
as many as a dozen brace. There are no game-
laws in Nova Scotia, except one continually set
at nought, prohibiting the killing of certain
birds at a certain period. Game at present is
abundant, though it is impossible to say how
long it will remain so in a land where every one
is allowed to "sport" when and where he
pleases. On referring to the market price of
partridges at Halifax on this particular day, I
found it was twenty-five cents, or one shilling
sterling, per brace, from which it might have been
inferred, and doubtless with justice, that the price
in the woods was considerably inferior, if they
were to be sold at all in a region where every little
boy or idle man in possession of a gun could go
and shoot for himself.

Having ordered our dinner, we started for
the mines, and speedily came upon Waverley
Cottage, which gives its name to the town,
and which, less than six years ago, stood
alone in the wilderness. A Mr. Allan, a Scotchman,
a manufacturer of pails and buckets, and
a great admirer of the genius of his illustrious
countryman, Sir Walter Scott, had bestowed the
name of the famous novel on his little establishment,
partly because it was a pretty name,
partly to keep up the remembrances and traditions
of the "old country," which a Scotchman,
however remote he may be from it, never
ceases to love, with a love that absence only
makes the fonder. Mr. Allan, good easy man,
little thought of the golden treasure amid
the rocks that on every side, except that
towards the lake, lifted their bare pates to the
blue sky. But the first gold of Nova Scotia
was not found here. In the summer of 1861,
alluvial gold was discovered at a place called
Tangier, in the county of Halifax, and, in digging
some improved sewers in the city of Halifax,
the workmen came upon unmistakable evidence
of a vein of gold-bearing quartz. Prospecting
for gold, which had been for some time carried
on with indifferent success, received a new
impetus from these discoveries, and within a
circuit of many miles, commencing a few
hundred yards from Mr. Allan's cottage, the
precious metal was found embedded in the surface
quartz in such quantities as to justify the hope
that by deep digging a large amount of treasure
might reward the labourer's toil. Nor was the
hope fallacious. Waverley Cottage in less than
a year after this time, found itself the most
prominent building in a town called after itself;
and bucket-making ceased to be the staple and
only business of the place.

Our way to the mines was tedious, and
we had ultimately to alight, leave our carriage
and horses in the shadiest place we could
find, and toil up the stony ascent to the
office of the superintendent. This gentleman,
a German, and the employer of some hundreds
of his fellow-countrymen, was prepared for
our coming, did the honours of the mines with
the greatest courtesy, and explained all the not
very intricate operations that are necessary
to extract the quartz from the earth, crush
it by steam or water power, and collect the
residuum of gold. In this region it does not
pay the individual miner to try his fortune
on his own account, as it does in California
and Australia. The lode, which is about three
feet in width, and of unknown depth as well as
length, runs under the hard quartzite rock at a
minimum distance of eighty or a hundred feet
from the surface; and considerable capital is
required to purchase the machinery and to hire
the labour necessary to work it to advantage.
For a royalty of three per cent on the produce
of the mines, to be paid to the government of
Nova Scotia, what is called a "mining area,"
may on certain well-defined, and by no means
onerous, terms, be obtained by any responsible
person; these areas, sometimes taken up
in the first flush of the gold excitement by
people who knew nothing of the business, have
since passed into the hands of associations
formed for the purpose of working them
scientifically. Foremost and most successful of these
is the German Company, which work the
Waverley mines, and which, without the aid of
puffery or stock-jobbery, but by solid attention to
the business in all its details, have made the
Waverley mines the most productive of all the
mines of Nova Scotia, though the quartz is by
no means the richest to be found in the colony,
averaging less than one ounce of gold per ton
of quartz: while at the Oldham mines quartz
has been discovered, one lot having yielded at
the rate of one hundred and three ounces per
ton. "Every month," according to the then
last official report to the government, "gold
mining is becoming less a series of spasmodic
operations and more a steady business, into
which men enter without any extraordinary
excitement, and which they prosecute with the
steady energy and the rational expectations
they might be supposed to carry into any other
business. The great advantage, too, of working
the mines on a more extended scale than
formerly has become pretty generally recognised.
Formerly operations were, for the most
part, carried on by individuals, or small
associations, of very moderate means, occupying
each but a small mining tract, and usually
limiting their works to a single shaft. Every
auriferous quartz lode is found to vary in richness,
both in a vertical and a horizontal direction.
Nothing was more common than for the
single-shaft miner to get discouraged when he
reached a comparatively poor section of what
was really a rich lode as a whole, and to
abandon his mine altogether, at the same time
imparting his discouragement to many others
in his vicinity. Many quartz lodes have thus
been condemned as too poor to be profitably
worked, which would prove highly remunerative