Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/368

. 21, 1861.] which was perfectly bewildering to my shaggy friends.

About an hour was spent in this lively manner, and at last the directors came to conclusions that were favourable to Mr. Perkes’s gold-crushing machine and to me, completely exonerating us both from any charge of inefficiency as far as our part of the work was concerned; the captain and the miners also came in for their share of approbation, and the latter were generously tipped.

The serious part of the day’s business being now over, they invited me to partake of lunch with them. The hampers were unpacked, and delicious cold things were laid out on the grass, beneath the combined shadows of a wide-spreading chesnut tree and one of the huge water-wheels; everybody was in the best of tempers, and we soon got very happy indeed. There was a pastoral freshness about this way of settling gold mines which had an inexpressible charm. The total ruin of the Victoria, which had just been de facto decided, did not in the slightest degree cloud the merriment of our little pic-nic; it had been tacitly brought about (the ruin, not the pic-nic), and was tacitly ignored.

As soon as the meal was over, the young ladies of the party took out their albums, and jotted down parts of the surrounding landscape with a rapidity at which Turner would have stood aghast. How they chatted and laughed, and how happy they were! The element of the gushing nature was in them, and a thimblefull of champagne had brought it out. I also had drunk champagne, a little too much perhaps, and gushed in unison. I complimented them on their performance with the brush in several languages, two of which I really knew, as my education had been continental; and praised the tender chocolate hue of their trees, and the deep ultramarine of their backgrounds, and even went so far as to suggest that a delicate check-pattern for their cows would be very appropriate. Papas and mammas looked on delighted. I also enlivened the foregathering with the loudest Tyrolese ditties those hills had ever echoed, and two sisters sang “Excelsior” to the