Page:The History of Ballarat.djvu/13

 has a broad slope up from the left bank of the Leigh to the foot of the ranges, was the Magpie rush of 1855-6. For a mile nearly every inch of frontage was fought for then, and a town of over four thousand inhabitants sprang up. Gold was found plentifully, and warehouse, hotel, and saloon crowded close with dwelling and church along the thoroughfare. A summer flood surprised the dwellers on the lowland and carried off lives as well as property, mingling a tragic sorrow with the losses of the unsuccessful. Time, less sudden than the midsummer freshet, but more sweeping, has cleared the ground of almost every vestige of the busy but fragile life of fifteen years ago. But the eternal sense of the Infinite survives "our little lives" and all their fitful pulsations of varying passion. Yonder, where, by the bush track side, the rounding slope swells upon the south, stands a church, sombre, lonely, and silent as the Roman sentinel at Pompeii when all around him had fled or fallen. This is all, save here and there heaps of broken bottles and sardine tins half hidden by the grass, and a few faint trench and building lines, softened by the rains, and bright at this time with the young verdure of the turning season. The most curious eye could now discover no other traces of the rush if it were not for the broader and deeper marks left where the first miners fought their industrial way, and where, for years, their followers retraced the golden trail On going up the Yarrowee banks northward a space, as one looks up the valley he sees, beyond the city, the bare top, the white artificial chasms and banks and mounds, where Black Hill raised its dark dense head of forest trees before the digger rent the hill in twain, and half disembowelled the swelling headland.

Besides the pastoral settlers already mentioned, there are yet with us some of the first discoverers. Esmond is still here. Woodward and Turner, of the Golden Point discoverers, are still here in Ballarat, and Merrick and some others of that band remain in the district. Others who followed them within the first week or two are also amongst our busy townsfolk of to-day.

While these remained it was thought desirable to gather some of the honey of fact from fugitive opportunity, that it might be garnered for the historian of the future. Nearly all the