After reading Hewitt’s account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening, I had in my mind’s eye, all night, the numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water,—­the locality to which men furiously rush to probe for their fortunes,—­uncertain where they shall break ground,—­not knowing but the gold is under their camp itself,—­sometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it by a foot,—­turned into demons, and regardless of each other’s rights, in their thirst for riches,—­whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honey-combed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in them,—­standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and disease.  Having read this, and partly forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and with that vision of the diggings still before me, I asked myself, why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles,—­why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you,—­what though it were a sulky-gully?  At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.  Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling.  His solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two.

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies.  They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.  Is not our native soil auriferous?  Does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our native valley? and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us?  Yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavor to supplant him.  He may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim.  They will not mind his cradles or his toms.  He is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at Ballarat, but may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his tom.