Caldigate had begun to appreciate all this, and to understand in part what they would have to do during this month, and how they would have to live.  It was proposed that they should at once fix on a spot,—­’peg out a claim,’ on some unoccupied piece of ground, buy for themselves a small tent,—­of which they were assured that they would find many for sale,—­and then begin to sink a hole.  When they entered Ahalala, Caldigate was surprised to find that Mick was the most tired of the three.  It is always so.  The man who has laboured from his youth upwards can endure with his arms.  It is he who has had leisure to shoot, to play cricket, to climb up mountains and to handle a racket, that can walk.  ’Darned if you ain’t better stuff than I took you for,’ said Mick, as the three let the swags down from their backs on the veranda of Ridley’s hotel at Ahalala.

Ahalala was a very different place from Nobble,—­made Nobble seem to be almost a compact and prosperous city.  At Nobble there was at any rate a street.  But at Ahalala everything was straggling.  The houses, such as they were, stood here and there about the place, while a great part of the population lived under canvas.  And then Ahalala was decidedly in the forest.  The trees around had not yet been altogether killed, nor had they been cut down in sufficient numbers to divest the place of its forest appearance.  Ahalala was leafy, and therefore, though much less regular, also less hideous than Nobble.  When Dick first made tender inquiry as to the comforts of an hotel, he was assured that there were at least a couple of dozen.  But the place was bewildering.  There seemed to be no beginning to it and no end.  There were many tracks about here and there,—­but nothing which could be called a road.  The number of holes was infinite,—­each hole covered by a rough windlass used for taking out the dirt, which was thrown loosely anywhere round the aperture.  Here and there were to be seen little red flags stuck upon the end of poles.  These indicated, as Mick informed them, those fortunate adventures in which gold had been found.  At those very much more numerous hillocks which showed no red flag, the labourers were hitherto labouring in vain.  There was a little tent generally near to each hillock in which the miners slept, packed nearly as close as sheep in a fold.  As our party made its way through the midst of this new world to Ridley’s hotel, our friend observed many a miner sitting at his evening meal.  Each generally had a frying-pan between his legs, out of which he was helping himself to meat which he had cooked on the ashes just behind him.  Sometimes two or three were sharing their provisions out of the same frying-pan; but as a rule each miner had his own, and each had it between his legs.