The convicts stole boats at Launceston, and landed at various places about Corner Inlet.  Some were arrested by the police and sent back to Tasmania.  Many called at Yanakie Station for free rations.  Mr. Bennison applied for police protection, and Old Joe, armed with a carbine, was sent from Alberton as a garrison.  Soon afterwards a cutter of about fifteen tons burden arrived at Corner Inlet manned by four convicts, who took the mainsail ashore and used it as a tent.  They then allowed the cutter to drift on the rocks under Mount Singapore, and she went to pieces directly.  While trying to find a road to Melbourne, they came to Yanakie Station, and they found nobody at the house except Joe, Mrs. Bennison, and an old hand.  It was now Joe’s duty to overawe and arrest the men, but they, although unarmed, overawed and arrested Joe.  He became exceedingly civil, and after Mrs. Bennison had supplied them with provisions he showed them the road to Melbourne.  They were arrested a few days afterwards at Dandenong and sent back to the island prison.

A NEW RUSH.

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“And there was gathering in hot haste.”

When gold was first discovered at Stockyard Creek, Griffiths, one of the prospectors, came to me with the intention of registering the claim, under the impression that I was Mining Registrar.  He showed me a very good sample of gold.  As I had not then been appointed registrar, he had to travel sixty miles further before he could comply with the necessary legal formalities.  Then the rush began.  Old diggers came from all parts of Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, and New Zealand; also men who had never dug before, and many who did not intend to dig—­pickpockets, horse thieves, and jumpers.  The prospectors’ claim proved the richest, and the jumpers and the lawyers paid particular attention to it.  The trail of the old serpent is over everything.  The desire of the jumpers was to obtain possession of the rich claim, or of some part of it; and the lawyers longed for costs, and they got them.  The prospectors paid, and it was a long time before they could extricate their claim from the clutches of the law.  They found the goldfield, and they also soon found an unprofitable crop of lawsuits growing on it.  They were called upon to show cause before the warden and the Court of Mines why they should not be deprived of the fruit of their labours.  The fact of their having discovered gold, and of having pegged out and registered their claim, could not be denied; but then it was argued by counsel most learned in mining law that they had done something which they should have omitted to do, or had omitted to do something else which they should have done, frail human beings as they were, and therefore their claim should be declared to belong to some Ballarat jumper.  I had to sit and listen to such like legal logic until it made me sick, and ashamed of my species.  Of course, justice was never mentioned, that was out of the question; if law and justice don’t agree, so much the worse for justice.