confounding the judgment. Elsewhere, the horse was in use at the
puddling-trough, and machines for crushing quartz were under discussion.
But the Ballarat digger resisted the introduction of machinery, fearing
the capitalist machinery would bring in its train. He remained the
dreamer, the jealous individualist; he hovered for ever on the brink of
a stupendous discovery.

This dream it was, of vast wealth got without exertion, which had
decoyed the strange, motley crowd, in which peers and churchmen rubbed
shoulders with the scum of Norfolk Island, to exile in this outlandish
region. And the intention of all alike had been: to snatch a golden
fortune from the earth and then, hey, presto! for the old world again.
But they were reckoning without their host: only too many of those who
entered the country went out no more. They became prisoners to the soil.
The fabulous riches of which they had heard tell amounted, at best, to a
few thousands of pounds: what folly to depart with so little, when
mother earth still teemed! Those who drew blanks nursed an unquenchable
hope, and laboured all their days like navvies, for a navvy's wage.
Others again, broken in health or disheartened, could only turn to an
easier handiwork. There were also men who, as soon as fortune smiled on
them, dropped their tools and ran to squander the work of months in a
wild debauch; and they invariably returned, tail down, to prove their
luck anew. And, yet again, there were those who, having once seen the
metal in the raw: in dust, fine as that brushed from a butterfly's wing;
in heavy, chubby nuggets; or, more exquisite still, as the daffodil-yellow
veining of bluish-white quartz: these were gripped in the
subtlest way of all. A passion for the gold itself awoke in them an
almost sensual craving to touch and possess; and the glitter of a few
specks at the bottom of pan or cradle came, in time, to mean more to
them than "home," or wife, or child.