56 
MULDIVA 
CHAP. 
In red letters on a piece of canvas. This place consists 
of two diggers’ tents and a sort of verandah made out 
of branches of gum-trees. The general store is a tent 
on forked sticks with a wall of branches on all sides, 
the proprietor’s name is written in huge letters upon 
it, and a counter with glasses and array of tins proclaim 
his calling. The thermometer is 1 20° in the shade. 
Next comes a real bush bark hut, of which many 
are studded about in every direction, then another tent, 
a bakehouse, one or two more stores, and two shelters 
that call themselves hotels. A man sits under an awn- 
ing in the principal street (which is still full of felled 
trees and stumps) with the air of an Indian potentate, 
guarding a keg of beer, tumblers, matches, tobacco, 
pipes, etc. Here and there a native goes by, more or 
less in a state of intoxication. The butcher’s shop 
is a green arbour of boughs. Stores just now are 
“ out,” and a pound of flour for the time costs a 
shilling. 
Everything is full of life and activity. The new 
chum that you meet is reticent, the old hand communi- 
cative. Above, below, and around, are miners with 
thews and sinews, wresting the precious metal from 
beds of rock, burrows in hill-sides, and along the beds 
of an apology for a stream, whose waters are so full of 
lime that everything becomes encrusted with it, and even 
your clothes from the wash are powdered. John China- 
man goes by with his pack-horse, for already he is 
pioneering with his garden stuff; where his garden is I 
do not know : everything seems baked and parched up, 
and the poor miserable gum-trees do not look as if they 
could cast a yard of shade. All around are the bare 
rocky hills, and just behind the town is the great Muldiva 
mine which at present shows every sign of a prosperous 
future. A bullock -team goes by, and more natives’ 
