Barring Sydney or Melbourne, we’d never seen so many men in a crowd before; and how different they looked from the crawling people of a town! A green-banked rapid river ran before us, through a deep narrow valley. The bright green flats looked so strange with the yellow water rippling and rushing between them. Upon that small flat, and by the bank, and in the river itself, nearly 20,000 men were at work, harder and more silently than any crowd we’d ever seen before. Most of ‘em were digging, winding up greenhide buckets filled with gravel from shafts, which were sunk so thickly all over the place that you could not pass between without jostling someone. Others were driving carts heavily laden with the same stuff towards the river, in which hundreds of men were’ standing up to their waists washing the gold out of tin pans, iron buckets, and every kind of vessel or utensil. By far the greater number of miners used things like child’s cradles, rocking them to and fro while a constant stream of yellow water passed through. Very little talk went on; every man looked feverishly anxious to get the greatest quantity of work done by sundown.

Foot police and mounted troopers passed through the crowd every now and then, but there was apparently no use or no need for them; that time was to come. Now and then someone would come walking up, carrying a knapsack, not a swag, and showing by his round, rosy face that he hadn’t seen a summer’s sun in Australia. We saw a trooper riding towards us, and knowing it was best to take the bull by the horns, I pushed over to him, and asked if he could direct us to where Mr. Stevenson’s, the auctioneer’s, yard was.

“Whose horses are these?” he said, looking at the brands. “B.M., isn’t it?”

“Bernard Muldoon, Lower Macquarie,” I answered. “There’s a friend of his, a new chum, in charge; he’ll be here to-morrow.”

“Go on down Main Street (the first street in a diggings is always called Main Street) as you’re going,” he said carelessly, giving us all a parting look through, “and take the first lane to the right. It takes you to the yard. It’s sale-day to-morrow; you’re in luck.”

It was rather sharp work getting the colts through men, women, and children, carts, cradles, shafts, and tin dishes; but they were a trifle tired and tender-footed, so in less than twenty minutes they were all inside of a high yard, where they could scarcely see over the top, with a row of loose boxes and stalls behind. We put ‘em into Joe Stevenson’s hands to sell—that was what everyone called the auctioneer—and walked down the long street.