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were strewn with their bleached skeletons; the very leaves upon the trees crackled in 

 the heat and appeared to be as inflammable as tinder. As the summer advanced the 

 temperature became torrid, and on the morning of the 6th of February, 1851, the air 

 which blew down from the north resembled the breath of a furnace. A fierce wind 

 arose, gathering strength and velocity from hour to hour, until about noon it blew with 

 the violence of a tornado. By some inexplicable means it wrapped the whole country 

 in a sheet of flame fierce, awful and irresistible. Men, women and children, sheep and 

 cattle, birds and snakes fled before the fire in a common panic. The air was darkened 

 by volumes of smoke, relieved by showers of sparks ; the forests were ablaze, and on 

 the ranges the conflagration transformed their wooded slopes into appalling masses of 

 incandescent columns and arches. Farm-houses, fences, crops, orchards, gardens, hay-stacks, 

 bridges, wool-sheds, were swept away by the impetuous onrush of the flames which left 

 behind them nothing but a charred heap of ruins, and a scene of pitiable desolation. 

 The human fugitives fled to water, wherever it could be found, and stood in it, 

 breathing with difficulty the suffocating atmosphere, and listening with awe to the roar 

 of the elements and the cries of the affrighted animals. Many lives were lost, and the 

 value of the property and live stock destroyed on " Black Thursday " can only be 

 vaguely conjectured. Late in the evening a strong sea-breeze began to blow, driving 

 back the heavy pall of smoke that had deepened the darkness of the night, and the 

 next day dawned upon blackened homesteads, smouldering forests, charred carcases of 

 sheep, oxen, horses, poultry, and wild animals, and the face of the country presented such 

 an aspect of ruin and devastation as could never be effaced from the recollection of 

 those who had witnessed and survived the calamity. 



THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD. 



Four months afterwards men's minds were stirred by an excitement of another kind. 

 It was announced in the columns of the Port Phillip Gazette that gold had been 

 discovered in the Plenty Ranges, at no great distance from Melbourne ; and on the 

 loth of June, 1851, Mr. William Campbell, a settler on the Locldon, found some specks 

 of gold in quartz upon the station of Mr. Donald Cameron, at Chines. The news 

 spread, and hundreds of eager eyes were soon searching for traces of the precious 

 metal in all the settled districts of the colony. The simultaneousness and magnitude of 

 the discoveries were perfectly startling. It seemed as if the richest " pockets," the 

 heaviest nuggets, and the most precious " wash-dirt," had been deposited by a bounteous 

 Nature so near the surface, that nothing was necessary to get at the gold but the 

 simplest appliances and the labour of a few days, and, in some instances, of only a few 

 hours. At Clunes, at Buninyong, at Ballarat, and near most of the creeks in the 

 valley of the Loddon, men were congregated by hundreds and by thousands. Melbourne 

 was deserted, and so were the country townships, the sheep-farms and the cattle-stations. 

 ' The sacred thirst for gold " seized upon all classes, and its acquisition levelled all distinc- 

 tions. Who could be expected to pursue the ordinary occupations of industry, when, by- 

 sinking a hole in the earth for a few feet, he might come upon an old river-bed 

 glittering with golden sand, or find a " jeweller's shop," packed with nuggets as large 

 as potatoes, or discover a solid mass of the precious metal, too heavy to be lifted by 



