thought something had touched Marshall's brain, when suddenly all my
misgivings were put an end to by his flinging on the table a handful of
scales of pure virgin gold. I was fairly thunderstruck, and asked him
to explain what all this meant, when he went on to say, that, according
to my instructions, he had thrown, the mill-wheel out of gear, to let
the whole body of the water in the dam find a passage through the
tail-race, which was previously too narrow to allow the water to run
off in sufficient quantity, whereby the wheel was prevented from
efficiently performing its work. By this alteration the narrow channel
was considerably enlarged, and a mass of sand and gravel carried off by
the force of the torrent. Early in the morning after this took place,
he (Mr. Marshall) was walking along the left bank of the stream, when
he perceived something which he at first took for a piece of opal--a
clear transparent stone very common here--glittering on one of the
spots laid bare by the sudden crumbling away of the bank. He paid no
attention to this; but while he was giving directions to the workmen,
having observed several similar glittering fragments, his curiosity was
so far excited, that he stooped down and picked one of them up. 'Do you
know,' said Mr. Marshall to me, 'I positively debated within myself two
or three times whether I should take the trouble to bend my back to
pick up one of the pieces, and had decided on not doing so, when,
further on, another glittering morsel caught my eye--the largest of the
pieces now before you. I condescended to pick it up, and to my
astonishment found that it was a thin scale of what appears to be pure
gold.' He then gathered some twenty or thirty similar pieces, which on
examination convinced him that his suppositions were right. His first
impression was, that this gold had been lost or buried there by some
early Indian tribe--perhaps some of those mysterious inhabitants of the
west, of whom we have no account, but who dwelt on this continent
centuries ago, and built those cities and temples, the ruins of which