Following the Equator, Complete

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Following the Equator, Complete


There were forty pupils there--a few of them farmers, relearning their
trade, the rest young men mainly from the cities--novices. It seemed a
strange thing that an agricultural college should have an attraction for
city-bred youths, but such is the fact. They are good stuff, too; they
are above the agricultural average of intelligence, and they come without
any inherited prejudices in favor of hoary ignorances made sacred by long
descent.

The students work all day in the fields, the nurseries, and the
shearing-sheds, learning and doing all the practical work of the
business--three days in a week. On the other three they study and hear
lectures. They are taught the beginnings of such sciences as bear upon
agriculture--like chemistry, for instance. We saw the sophomore class in
sheep-shearing shear a dozen sheep. They did it by hand, not with the
machine. The sheep was seized and flung down on his side and held there;
and the students took off his coat with great celerity and adroitness.
Sometimes they clipped off a sample of the sheep, but that is customary
with shearers, and they don't mind it; they don't even mind it as much as
the sheep. They dab a splotch of sheep-dip on the place and go right
ahead.

The coat of wool was unbelievably thick. Before the shearing the sheep
looked like the fat woman in the circus; after it he looked like a bench.
He was clipped to the skin; and smoothly and uniformly. The fleece comes
from him all in one piece and has the spread of a blanket.

The college was flying the Australian flag--the gridiron of England
smuggled up in the northwest corner of a big red field that had the
random stars of the Southern Cross wandering around over it.

From Horsham we went to Stawell. By rail. Still in the colony of
Victoria. Stawell is in the gold-mining country. In the bank-safe was
half a peck of surface-gold--gold dust, grain gold; rich; pure in fact,
and pleasant to sift through one's fingers; and would be pleasanter if it
would stick. And there were a couple of gold bricks, very heavy to
handle, and worth $7,500 a piece. They were from a very valuable quartz
mine; a lady owns two-thirds of it; she has an income of $75,000 a month
from it, and is able to keep house.

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.

Frequently, in Australia, one has cloud-effects of an unfamiliar sort.
We had this kind of scenery, finely staged, all the way to Ballarat.
Consequently we saw more sky than country on that journey. At one time a
great stretch of the vault was densely flecked with wee ragged-edged
flakes of painfully white cloud-stuff, all of one shape and size, and
equidistant apart, with narrow cracks of adorable blue showing between.
The whole was suggestive of a hurricane of snow-flakes drifting across
the skies. By and by these flakes fused themselves together in
interminable lines, with shady faint hollows between the lines, the long
satin-surfaced rollers following each other in simulated movement, and
enchantingly counterfeiting the majestic march of a flowing sea. Later,
the sea solidified itself; then gradually broke up its mass into
innumerable lofty white pillars of about one size, and ranged these
across the firmament, in receding and fading perspective, in the
similitude of a stupendous colonnade--a mirage without a doubt flung from
the far Gates of the Hereafter.

The approaches to Ballarat were beautiful. The features, great green
expanses of rolling pasture-land, bisected by eye contenting hedges of
commingled new-gold and old-gold gorse--and a lovely lake. One must put
in the pause, there, to fetch the reader up with a slight jolt, and keep
him from gliding by without noticing the lake. One must notice it; for a
lovely lake is not as common a thing along the railways of Australia as
are the dry places. Ninety-two in the shade again, but balmy and
comfortable, fresh and bracing. A perfect climate.

Forty-five years ago the site now occupied by the City of Ballarat was a
sylvan solitude as quiet as Eden and as lovely. Nobody had ever heard of
it. On the 25th of August, 1851, the first great gold-strike made in
Australia was made here. The wandering prospectors who made it scraped
up two pounds and a half of gold the first day-worth $600. A few days
later the place was a hive--a town. The news of the strike spread
everywhere in a sort of instantaneous way--spread like a flash to the
very ends of the earth. A celebrity so prompt and so universal has
hardly been paralleled in history, perhaps. It was as if the name
BALLARAT had suddenly been written on the sky, where all the world could
read it at once.

The smaller discoveries made in the colony of New South Wales three
months before had already started emigrants toward Australia; they had
been coming as a stream, but they came as a flood, now. A hundred
thousand people poured into Melbourne from England and other countries in
a single month, and flocked away to the mines. The crews of the ships
that brought them flocked with them; the clerks in the government offices
followed; so did the cooks, the maids, the coachmen, the butlers, and the
other domestic servants; so did the carpenters, the smiths, the plumbers,
the painters, the reporters, the editors, the lawyers, the clients, the
barkeepers, the bummers, the blacklegs, the thieves, the loose women, the
grocers, the butchers, the bakers, the doctors, the druggists, the
nurses; so did the police; even officials of high and hitherto envied
place threw up their positions and joined the procession. This roaring
avalanche swept out of Melbourne and left it desolate, Sunday-like,
paralyzed, everything at a stand-still, the ships lying idle at anchor,
all signs of life departed, all sounds stilled save the rasping of the
cloud-shadows as they scraped across the vacant streets.

That grassy and leafy paradise at Ballarat was soon ripped open, and
lacerated and scarified and gutted, in the feverish search for its hidden
riches. There is nothing like surface-mining to snatch the graces and
beauties and benignities out of a paradise, and make an odious and
repulsive spectacle of it.

What fortunes were made! Immigrants got rich while the ship unloaded and
reloaded--and went back home for good in the same cabin they had come out
in! Not all of them. Only some. I saw the others in Ballarat myself,
forty-five years later--what were left of them by time and death and the
disposition to rove. They were young and gay, then; they are patriarchal
and grave, now; and they do not get excited any more. They talk of the
Past. They live in it. Their life is a dream, a retrospection.

Ballarat was a great region for "nuggets." No such nuggets were found in
California as Ballarat produced. In fact, the Ballarat region has
yielded the largest ones known to history. Two of them weighed about 180
pounds each, and together were worth $90,000. They were offered to any
poor person who would shoulder them and carry them away. Gold was so
plentiful that it made people liberal like that.

Ballarat was a swarming city of tents in the early days. Everybody was
happy, for a time, and apparently prosperous. Then came trouble. The
government swooped down with a mining tax. And in its worst form, too;
for it was not a tax upon what the miner had taken out, but upon what he
was going to take out--if he could find it. It was a license-tax license
to work his claim--and it had to be paid before he could begin digging.

Consider the situation. No business is so uncertain as surface-mining.
Your claim may be good, and it may be worthless. It may make you well
off in a month; and then again you may have to dig and slave for half a
year, at heavy expense, only to find out at last that the gold is not
there in cost-paying quantity, and that your time and your hard work have
been thrown away. It might be wise policy to advance the miner a monthly
sum to encourage him to develop the country's riches; but to tax him
monthly in advance instead--why, such a thing was never dreamed of in
America. There, neither the claim itself nor its products, howsoever
rich or poor, were taxed.

The Ballarat miners protested, petitioned, complained--it was of no use;
the government held its ground, and went on collecting the tax. And not
by pleasant methods, but by ways which must have been very galling to
free people. The rumblings of a coming storm began to be audible.

By and by there was a result; and I think it may be called the finest
thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution--small in size; but
great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for a
principle, a stand against injustice and oppression. It was the Barons
and John, over again; it was Hampden and Ship-Money; it was Concord and
Lexington; small beginnings, all of them, but all of them great in
political results, all of them epoch-making. It is another instance of a
victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honorable page to history; the
people know it and are proud of it. They keep green the memory of the
men who fell at the Eureka Stockade, and Peter Lalor has his monument.

The surface-soil of Ballarat was full of gold. This soil the miners
ripped and tore and trenched and harried and disembowled, and made it
yield up its immense treasure. Then they went down into the earth with
deep shafts, seeking the gravelly beds of ancient rivers and brooks--and
found them. They followed the courses of these streams, and gutted them,
sending the gravel up in buckets to the upper world, and washing out of
it its enormous deposits of gold. The next biggest of the two monster
nuggets mentioned above came from an old river-channel 180 feet under
ground.

Finally the quartz lodes were attacked. That is not poor-man's mining.
Quartz-mining and milling require capital, and staying-power, and
patience. Big companies were formed, and for several decades, now, the
lodes have been successfully worked, and have yielded great wealth.
Since the gold discovery in 1853 the Ballarat mines--taking the three
kinds of mining together--have contributed to the world's pocket
something over three hundred millions of dollars, which is to say that
this nearly invisible little spot on the earth's surface has yielded
about one-fourth as much gold in forty-four years as all California has
yielded in forty-seven. The Californian aggregate, from 1848 to 1895,
inclusive, as reported by the Statistician of the United States Mint, is
$1,265,215,217.

A citizen told me a curious thing about those mines. With all my
experience of mining I had never heard of anything of the sort before.
The main gold reef runs about north and south--of course for that is the
custom of a rich gold reef. At Ballarat its course is between walls of
slate. Now the citizen told me that throughout a stretch of twelve miles
along the reef, the reef is crossed at intervals by a straight black
streak of a carbonaceous nature--a streak in the slate; a streak no
thicker than a pencil--and that wherever it crosses the reef you will
certainly find gold at the junction. It is called the Indicator. Thirty
feet on each side of the Indicator (and down in the slate, of course) is
a still finer streak--a streak as fine as a pencil mark; and indeed, that
is its name Pencil Mark. Whenever you find the Pencil Mark you know that
thirty feet from it is the Indicator; you measure the distance, excavate,
find the Indicator, trace it straight to the reef, and sink your shaft;
your fortune is made, for certain. If that is true, it is curious. And
it is curious anyway.

Ballarat is a town of only 40,000 population; and yet, since it is in
Australia, it has every essential of an advanced and enlightened big
city. This is pure matter of course. I must stop dwelling upon these
things. It is hard to keep from dwelling upon them, though; for it is
difficult to get away from the surprise of it. I will let the other
details go, this time, but I must allow myself to mention that this
little town has a park of 326 acres; a flower garden of 83 acres, with an
elaborate and expensive fernery in it and some costly and unusually fine
statuary; and an artificial lake covering 600 acres, equipped with a
fleet of 200 shells, small sail boats, and little steam yachts.

At this point I strike out some other praiseful things which I was
tempted to add. I do not strike them out because they were not true or
not well said, but because I find them better said by another man--and a
man more competent to testify, too, because he belongs on the ground, and
knows. I clip them from a chatty speech delivered some years ago by Mr.
William Little, who was at that time mayor of Ballarat:

"The language of our citizens, in this as in other parts of
Australasia, is mostly healthy Anglo-Saxon, free from Americanisms,
vulgarisms, and the conflicting dialects of our Fatherland, and is
pure enough to suit a Trench or a Latham. Our youth, aided by
climatic influence, are in point of physique and comeliness
unsurpassed in the Sunny South. Our young men are well ordered; and
our maidens, 'not stepping over the bounds of modesty,' are as fair
as Psyches, dispensing smiles as charming as November flowers."

The closing clause has the seeming of a rather frosty compliment, but
that is apparent only, not real. November is summer-time there.

His compliment to the local purity of the language is warranted. It is
quite free from impurities; this is acknowledged far and wide. As in the
German Empire all cultivated people claim to speak Hanovarian German, so
in Australasia all cultivated people claim to speak Ballarat English.
Even in England this cult has made considerable progress, and now that it
is favored by the two great Universities, the time is not far away when
Ballarat English will come into general use among the educated classes of
Great Britain at large. Its great merit is, that it is shorter than
ordinary English--that is, it is more compressed. At first you have some
difficulty in understanding it when it is spoken as rapidly as the orator
whom I have quoted speaks it. An illustration will show what I mean.
When he called and I handed him a chair, he bowed and said:

"Q."

Presently, when we were lighting our cigars, he held a match to mine and
I said:

"Thank you," and he said:

"Km."

Then I saw. 'Q' is the end of the phrase "I thank you" 'Km' is the end
of the phrase "You are welcome." Mr. Little puts no emphasis upon either
of them, but delivers them so reduced that they hardly have a sound. All
Ballarat English is like that, and the effect is very soft and pleasant;
it takes all the hardness and harshness out of our tongue and gives to it
a delicate whispery and vanishing cadence which charms the ear like the
faint rustling of the forest leaves.




CHAPTER XXV.

"Classic." A book which people praise and don't read.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

On the rail again--bound for Bendigo. From diary:

October 23. Got up at 6, left at 7.30; soon reached Castlemaine, one of
the rich gold-fields of the early days; waited several hours for a train;
left at 3.40 and reached Bendigo in an hour. For comrade, a Catholic
priest who was better than I was, but didn't seem to know it--a man full
of graces of the heart, the mind, and the spirit; a lovable man. He will
rise. He will be a bishop some day. Later an Archbishop. Later a
Cardinal. Finally an Archangel, I hope. And then he will recall me when
I say, "Do you remember that trip we made from Ballarat to Bendigo, when
you were nothing but Father C., and I was nothing to what I am now?"
It has actually taken nine hours to come from Ballarat to Bendigo. We
could have saved seven by walking. However, there was no hurry.

Bendigo was another of the rich strikes of the early days. It does a
great quartz-mining business, now--that business which, more than any
other that I know of, teaches patience, and requires grit and a steady
nerve. The town is full of towering chimney-stacks, and hoisting-works,
and looks like a petroleum-city. Speaking of patience; for example, one
of the local companies went steadily on with its deep borings and
searchings without show of gold or a penny of reward for eleven years
--then struck it, and became suddenly rich. The eleven years' work had
cost $55,000, and the first gold found was a grain the size of a pin's
head. It is kept under locks and bars, as a precious thing, and is
reverently shown to the visitor, "hats off." When I saw it I had not
heard its history.

"It is gold. Examine it--take the glass. Now how much should you say it
is worth?"

I said:

"I should say about two cents; or in your English dialect, four
farthings."

"Well, it cost L11,000."

"Oh, come!"

"Yes, it did. Ballarat and Bendigo have produced the three monumental
nuggets of the world, and this one is the monumentalest one of the three.
The other two represent 19,000 a piece; this one a couple of thousand
more. It is small, and not much to look at, but it is entitled to (its)
name--Adam. It is the Adam-nugget of this mine, and its children run up
into the millions."

Speaking of patience again, another of the mines was worked, under heavy
expenses, during 17 years before pay was struck, and still another one
compelled a wait of 21 years before pay was struck; then, in both
instances, the outlay was all back in a year or two, with compound
interest.

Bendigo has turned out even more gold than Ballarat. The two together
have produced $650,000,000 worth--which is half as much as California has
produced.

It was through Mr. Blank--not to go into particulars about his name--it
was mainly through Mr. Blank that my stay in Bendigo was made memorably
pleasant and interesting. He explained this to me himself. He told me
that it was through his influence that the city government invited me to
the town-hall to hear complimentary speeches and respond to them; that it
was through his influence that I had been taken on a long pleasure-drive
through the city and shown its notable features; that it was through his
influence that I was invited to visit the great mines; that it was
through his influence that I was taken to the hospital and allowed to see
the convalescent Chinaman who had been attacked at midnight in his lonely
hut eight weeks before by robbers, and stabbed forty-six times and
scalped besides; that it was through his influence that when I arrived
this awful spectacle of piecings and patchings and bandagings was sitting
up in his cot letting on to read one of my books; that it was through his
influence that efforts had been made to get the Catholic Archbishop of
Bendigo to invite me to dinner; that it was through his influence that
efforts had been made to get the Anglican Bishop of Bendigo to ask me to
supper; that it was through his influence that the dean of the editorial
fraternity had driven me through the woodsy outlying country and shown
me, from the summit of Lone Tree Hill, the mightiest and loveliest
expanse of forest-clad mountain and valley that I had seen in all
Australia. And when he asked me what had most impressed me in Bendigo
and I answered and said it was the taste and the public spirit which had
adorned the streets with 105 miles of shade trees, he said that it was
through his influence that it had been done.

But I am not representing him quite correctly. He did not say it was
through his influence that all these things had happened--for that would
have been coarse; he merely conveyed that idea; conveyed it so subtly
that I only caught it fleetingly, as one catches vagrant faint breaths of
perfume when one traverses the meadows in summer; conveyed it without
offense and without any suggestion of egoism or ostentation--but conveyed
it, nevertheless.

He was an Irishman; an educated gentleman; grave, and kindly, and
courteous; a bachelor, and about forty-five or possibly fifty years old,
apparently. He called upon me at the hotel, and it was there that we had
this talk. He made me like him, and did it without trouble. This was
partly through his winning and gentle ways, but mainly through the
amazing familiarity with my books which his conversation showed. He was
down to date with them, too; and if he had made them the study of his
life he could hardly have been better posted as to their contents than he
was. He made me better satisfied with myself than I had ever been
before. It was plain that he had a deep fondness for humor, yet he never
laughed; he never even chuckled; in fact, humor could not win to outward
expression on his face at all. No, he was always grave--tenderly,
pensively grave; but he made me laugh, all along; and this was very
trying--and very pleasant at the same time--for it was at quotations from
my own books.

When he was going, he turned and said:

"You don't remember me?"

"I? Why, no. Have we met before?"

"No, it was a matter of correspondence."

"Correspondence?"

"Yes, many years ago. Twelve or fifteen. Oh, longer than that. But of
course you----" A musing pause. Then he said:

"Do you remember Corrigan Castle?"

"N-no, I believe I don't. I don't seem to recall the name."

He waited a moment, pondering, with the door-knob in his hand, then
started out; but turned back and said that I had once been interested in
Corrigan Castle, and asked me if I would go with him to his quarters in
the evening and take a hot Scotch and talk it over. I was a teetotaler
and liked relaxation, so I said I would.

We drove from the lecture-hall together about half-past ten. He had a
most comfortably and tastefully furnished parlor, with good pictures on
the walls, Indian and Japanese ornaments on the mantel, and here and
there, and books everywhere-largely mine; which made me proud. The light
was brilliant, the easy chairs were deep-cushioned, the arrangements for
brewing and smoking were all there. We brewed and lit up; then he passed
a sheet of note-paper to me and said--