The Stawell region is not productive of gold only; it has great vineyards, and produces exceptionally fine wines.  One of these vineyards—­the Great Western, owned by Mr. Irving—­is regarded as a model.  Its product has reputation abroad.  It yields a choice champagne and a fine claret, and its hock took a prize in France two or three years ago.  The champagne is kept in a maze of passages under ground, cut in the rock, to secure it an even temperature during the three-year term required to perfect it.  In those vaults I saw 120,000 bottles of champagne.  The colony of Victoria has a population of 1,000,000, and those people are said to drink 25,000,000 bottles of champagne per year.  The dryest community on the earth.  The government has lately reduced the duty upon foreign wines.  That is one of the unkindnesses of Protection.  A man invests years of work and a vast sum of money in a worthy enterprise, upon the faith of existing laws; then the law is changed, and the man is robbed by his own government.

On the way back to Stawell we had a chance to see a group of boulders called the Three Sisters—­a curiosity oddly located; for it was upon high ground, with the land sloping away from it, and no height above it from whence the boulders could have rolled down.  Relics of an early ice-drift, perhaps.  They are noble boulders.  One of them has the size and smoothness and plump sphericity of a balloon of the biggest pattern.

The road led through a forest of great gum-trees, lean and scraggy and sorrowful.  The road was cream-white—­a clayey kind of earth, apparently.  Along it toiled occasional freight wagons, drawn by long double files of oxen.  Those wagons were going a journey of two hundred miles, I was told, and were running a successful opposition to the railway!  The railways are owned and run by the government.

Those sad gums stood up out of the dry white clay, pictures of patience and resignation.  It is a tree that can get along without water; still it is fond of it—­ravenously so.  It is a very intelligent tree and will detect the presence of hidden water at a distance of fifty feet, and send out slender long root-fibres to prospect it.  They will find it; and will also get at it even through a cement wall six inches thick.  Once a cement water-pipe under ground at Stawell began to gradually reduce its output, and finally ceased altogether to deliver water.  Upon examining into the matter it was found stopped up, wadded compactly with a mass of root-fibres, delicate and hair-like.  How this stuff had gotten into the pipe was a puzzle for some little time; finally it was found that it had crept in through a crack that was almost invisible to the eye.  A gum tree forty feet away had tapped the pipe and was drinking the water.

CHAPTER XXIV.

There is no such thing as “the Queen’s English.”  The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares! 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.