the clients, the barkeepers, the bummers, the blacklegs, the thieves, the loose women, the grocers, the butchers, the bakers, the doctors, the druggists, the nurses; so did the police; even officials of high and hitherto envied place threw up their positions and joined the procession.  This roaring avalanche swept out of Melbourne and left it desolate, Sunday-like, paralyzed, everything at a stand-still, the ships lying idle at anchor, all signs of life departed, all sounds stilled save the rasping of the cloud-shadows as they scraped across the vacant streets.

That grassy and leafy paradise at Ballarat was soon ripped open, and lacerated and scarified and gutted, in the feverish search for its hidden riches.  There is nothing like surface-mining to snatch the graces and beauties and benignities out of a paradise, and make an odious and repulsive spectacle of it.

What fortunes were made!  Immigrants got rich while the ship unloaded and reloaded—­and went back home for good in the same cabin they had come out in!  Not all of them.  Only some.  I saw the others in Ballarat myself, forty-five years later—­what were left of them by time and death and the disposition to rove.  They were young and gay, then; they are patriarchal and grave, now; and they do not get excited any more.  They talk of the Past.  They live in it.  Their life is a dream, a retrospection.

Ballarat was a great region for “nuggets.”  No such nuggets were found in California as Ballarat produced.  In fact, the Ballarat region has yielded the largest ones known to history.  Two of them weighed about 180 pounds each, and together were worth $90,000.  They were offered to any poor person who would shoulder them and carry them away.  Gold was so plentiful that it made people liberal like that.

Ballarat was a swarming city of tents in the early days.  Everybody was happy, for a time, and apparently prosperous.  Then came trouble.  The government swooped down with a mining tax.  And in its worst form, too; for it was not a tax upon what the miner had taken out, but upon what he was going to take out—­if he could find it.  It was a license-tax license to work his claim—­and it had to be paid before he could begin digging.

Consider the situation.  No business is so uncertain as surface-mining.  Your claim may be good, and it may be worthless.  It may make you well off in a month; and then again you may have to dig and slave for half a year, at heavy expense, only to find out at last that the gold is not there in cost-paying quantity, and that your time and your hard work have been thrown away.  It might be wise policy to advance the miner a monthly sum to encourage him to develop the country’s riches; but to tax him monthly in advance instead—­why, such a thing was never dreamed of in America.  There, neither the claim itself nor its products, howsoever rich or poor, were taxed.

The Ballarat miners protested, petitioned, complained—­it was of no use; the government held its ground, and went on collecting the tax.  And not by pleasant methods, but by ways which must have been very galling to free people.  The rumblings of a coming storm began to be audible.