tales I have been told. The comfortless
profusion with which many of the successful
returned diggers scattered their money
woefully demonstrated how great an evil is
wealth in untaught or unprincipled hands.
Cigars, lit with bank-notes of value;
sandwiches, made of bread and butter and bank-
notes, and eaten by wretches boasting of
their costly mouthful; sovereigns flung down
in payment for a shilling glass of spirits;
these, and hundreds of similar instances,
might be narrated, were it pleasant or profitable
to collect such degrading proofs of folly
and wickedness.

Among the many servants who at different
times left our service to go to the diggings, I
only knew one instance where the gold gained
became really beneficial. This happy exception
was an industrious farm-labourer (formerly a
prisoner), who, whilst with us, used to spend
the long winter evenings in weaving baskets
from the willows which border many of our
meadows. Every house in the district had
some of his baskets, which he sold at such
prices as to provide himself with clothes,
tobacco, and other extras, and could thus
lay by all his wages in the savings' bank.
I was not a little troubled at the intelligence
that he purposed drawing his money,
and starting for the diggings. He did so;
and, in a few months wrote to us, saying
that he had been very fortunate, had dug
gold to the amount of eight hundred pounds,
and was then on board an English ship on
his way home. He has written again since,
telling very pleasantly of his happy meeting
with his wife and children, who had
been industrious and thriving during his
absence; and enclosing a card of his shop,
having entered into a respectable business,
and carefully purchased his stock-in-
trade from the best markets, with the ready
gold he had acquired. I wish we had
more such cheering tales to tell; but, alas!
this is—so far as my personal acquaintance
with gold-digging results extends—a solitary
instance.

Were I to take up the opposite side of the
question, I might describe the deserted homes
I have seen—the dismantled cottages and
desolate gardens, that were bright and hopeful
before the gold madness came amongst us.
I might tell of wives, who conducted
themselves soberly and decently whilst with their
husbands; but who turned back to all their
infamous habits when released from wholesome
restraint by the men's departure for
the diggings; of children neglected, scantily
fed, and more scantily clothed, and often
indebted to chance charity for sheer existence:
this state of abject wretchedness and
starvation being suddenly changed to one
of boastful idleness and dissipation, if the
husband returned with enough gold to
produce a short-lived, drunken prosperity. Many
working men came back with fifty or a
hundred pounds, deeming that an inexhaustible
mine of wealth. The wife of one of these,
who had been my servant, and who, after
her marriage, was glad to do plain needlework
for me, one day brought home her
sewing unfinished, with a "Much obliged
t' ye, ma'am, for what ye've give me, but ye
see my Robert's come back, and he's got
enough to keep huz comf'ble all we're lives;
and I don't see as I need slave any more,
an' so I've brought back the little shirts, and
there's the buttons and the pattern shirt, all
together, if you'll please to give me a settling
for what I've done." The settling was very
speedily effected. I saw no more of my
retired seamstress; but the sequel was as I
anticipated. She straightway relapsed into her old
vices of inebriety and every kind of disorderly
and bad conduct. She beat her children, one
of them a baby, so cruelly as to endanger their
lives; finally, she had her original sentence
of transportation renewed. The great fortune
which had thus ruined her industry, and caused
the loss of her freedom, I found, amounted
only to sixty pounds; and, as she and her
husband, when living with us as laundress
and cook, had received thirty-five pounds
a-year wages, besides food, lodging, and fuel,
the overwhelming effect of such a sum seems
difficult to account for.

The wife of another servant who had
been fortunate at the diggings, and had
brought home about seventy pounds, came
one day for her own and her husband's
rations, wearing a very showy cashmere
dress, such as are sold here at about thirty
or forty shillings; and on my remarking,
"That is a very gay gown, Susan, for such a
wet, muddy day," she simpered, and replied,
"O, ma'am, I've had nine new 'uns since my
husband came home." He had been back
just a fortnight.

The sudden change from a wardrobe of
two old cotton gowns and one best one, to an
assortment of flounced muslins and silks—to
say nothing of satin bonnets, costly shawls,
artificial flowers by the bushel, parasols,
bracelets, and white veils—often causes
exhibitions of taste and colour which are
extremely curious and ingenious, and would
be amusing were they not really so very
sad. The heaps of finery—hats, feathers,
flounces, and jackets—which the children of
these people helplessly toddle under, must be
seen to be believed. I once counted the
frills on a baby just able to trot about—
trousers, four; frock, five; jacket, two, with
a quilling of lace round the poor little
smothered throat, and a triple bordered lace cap
and bows under an immense fancy Tuscan
hat, covered with artificial roses. The poor
little victim was my fellow passenger in a
stage-coach, with its mother and two more
children dressed in like style. Overpowered
with sleep, my small friend with the roses
dozed off, and bent the filagree hat against
the coach. A sharp, shrewish sister of five,
in a white satin bonnet and feathers, poked