They said he was a lucky digger, and they were his friends and fellow-countrymen.  A lucky digger could find friends anywhere, from any country, without looking for them, especially if he was drunk, as was this stranger.  They said he had travelled from Melbourne with a pack horse, and, near Mount Alexander, he saw a woman picking up something or other on the side of a hill.  She might be gathering flowers, but he could not see any.  He stopped and watched her for a while and then went nearer.  She did not take any notice of him, so he thought the poor thing had been lost in the bush, and had gone cranky.  He pitied her, and said: 

“My good woman, have you lost anything?  Could I help you to look for it?”

“I am not your good woman, and I have not lost anything; so I don’t want anybody to help me to look for it.”

He was now quite sure she was cranky.  She stooped and picked up something, but he could not see what it was.  He began to look on the ground, and presently he found a bright little nugget of gold.  Then he knew what kind of flowers the woman was gathering.  Without a word he took his horse to the foot of the hill, hobbled it, and took off his swag.  He went up the hill again, filled his pan with earth, and washed it off at the nearest waterhole.  He had struck it rich; the hill-side was sprinkled with gold, either on the surface or just below it.  For two weeks there were only two parties at work on that hill, parties of one, but they did not form a partnership.  The woman came every day, picking and scratching like an old hen, and went away at sundown.

When the man went away he took with him more than a hundredweight of gold.  He was worth looking at, so we put more wood on the fire, and made a good blaze.  Yes, he was a lucky digger, and he was enjoying his luck.  He was blazing drunk, was in evening dress, wore a black bell-topper, and kid gloves.  The gloves had saved his hands from being burned when he thrust them into the fire.  There could be no doubt that he was enjoying himself.  He came suddenly out of the black night, and staggered away into it again with his two friends.

One forenoon, about ten o’clock, while we were busy, peacefully digging and puddling, we heard a sound like the rumbling of distant thunder from the direction of Bendigo flat.  The thunder grew louder until it became like the bellowing of ten thousand bulls.  It was the welcome accorded by the diggers to our “trusty and well-beloved” Government when it came forth on a digger hunt.  It was swelled by the roars, and cooeys, and curses of every man above ground and below, in the shafts and drives on the flats, and in the tunnels of the White Hills, from Golden Gully and Sheep’s Head, to Job’s Gully and Eaglehawk, until the warning that “Joey’s out” had reached to the utmost bounds of the goldfield.