Oh! it was twelve thousand miles above the monotonous and scanty strains of a European wood; and when the roving and laughing, and harshly demanding bacca-boxes and then as good as telling you they didn’t care a feather for bacca-boxes or anything else, gyroc de doc! cheboc cheboc cheboc! and loudly announcing their immediate departure, and perching in the same place all the more and sweet, low modulations ending in putting on the steam and creaking like Punch, and then almost tumbling off the branches with laughing at the general accumulation of nonsense—­when all this drollery and devilry and joy and absurdity were at their maddest, and a thousand feathered fountains bubbling song were at their highest, then came the cause of all the merry hubbub—­the pinnacles of rock glowed burnished gold, Nature, that had crept from gloom to pallor, burst from pallor to light and life and burning color—­the great sun’s forehead came with one gallant stride into the sky—­and it was day!

Out shone ten thousand tents of every size and hue and shape, from Isaac Levi’s rood of white canvas down to sugar-loaves, and even to miserable roofs built on the bare ground with slips of bark, under which unlucky diggers crept at night like badgers—­roofed beds—­no more—­the stars twinkling through chinks in the tester.  The myriad tents were clustered for full five miles on each side of the river, and it wound and sparkled in and out at various distances, and shone like a mirror in the distant background.

At the first ray the tents disgorged their inmates, and the human hive began to hum; then came the fight, the maneuvering, the desperate wrestle with Nature, and the keen fencing with their fellows—­in short, the battle—­to which, that nothing might be wanting, out burst the tremendous artillery of ten thousand cradles louder than thunder, and roaring and crashing without a pause.

The base of the two-peaked rock that looked so silvery in the moon is now seen to be covered with manuscript advertisements posted on it; we can only read two or three as we run to our work: 

“Immense reduction in eggs only one shilling each!!!  Bevan’s store.”

“Go-ahead library and registration office for new chums.  Tom Long in the dead-horse gully.”

“If this meets the i of Tom Bowles he will ear of is pal in the iron-bark gully.”

“This is to give notice that whereas my wife Elizabeth Sutton has taken to drink and gone off with my mate Bob, I will not be answerable for your debts nor hold any communication with you in future.

“JAMES SUTTON.”

A young Jew, Nathan, issued from Levi’s tent with a rough table and two or three pair of scales and other paraphernalia of a gold assayer and merchant.  This was not the first mine by many the old Jew had traded in.

His first customers this morning were George and Robinson.

“Our tent was attacked last night, Mr. Levi.”