small and fine. Upon a sturdy little carriage
hard by, stood a number of such heavy little
boxes that it gave me a pain over the eyes to
look at them, brim full of Australian gold;
thousands of such boxes, tightly wedged
down and brim full too, being then upon the
sea, and being yet to be upon the sea, and
being, as it would seem now, never for
centuries to leave off coming over the sea, to
supply the scoops. All this treasure, lying,
like any common merchandise, quite familiarly
in a big uncomfortable counting-house open
to the yard, the fog, and rain; and nobody
appearing to look particularly after it, nobody
appearing to be at all uneasy about it!

"To cook Australian gold," says my friend,
imparting his golden wisdom in the form of
a recipe. "Get your furnace fire well up. Fill
your pot from your scoop. Boil for twenty
minutes. Pour off in hand mould, to the
weight of nearly eighteen pounds troy, and
the value of eight hundred pounds sterling.
Strew a little ivory-black on the top; cool;
and serve up for the Bank of England."

But, the treasure in this counting-house
was not all Australian gold. There was
gold from the coast of Africa in dust, with
here and there among the dust pieces of
ear-ring, and of other ornaments obtained
by commerce from the natives. There was
other gold in plenty, from Diggings and washings,
waiting its turn to go into the refiner's
pot. In one part of the room, were carefully
constructed scales, of size and strength suited
for the weight of heavy matter in immense
quantities. In another part of the room were
smaller scales, ingeniously formed to combine
strength and delicacy, for the weighing of the
ingots of gold as they passed from the
refiner's hands. The beam of these scales
was fashioned from one piece of metal by a
former partner in the firm, who did his work
so well, that when the beam was hung, before
its final adjustment, the two sides were found
to differ by only ten grains.

From the counting-house, we passed into a
place where half-a-dozen strong men, who
relieved each other every ten minutes, were
with sledge-hammers forcing a chisel through
a great lump of silver. The silver was
bright and crystalline: the chisel, a wedge
of iron with a piece of steel inserted to give
hardness to the point. More than strength
was needed in the swinging of one of the
great hammers. It must not only make a
wide sweep and fall heavily, but it must fall
at the right moment, so that a rapid round of
blows might be kept up without intermission,
and no hammer fall at the wrong time. A
lump of silver scarcely cold out of one furnace,
was being beaten and sliced by the hammers
into pieces of a fit size to go into another
melting pot. Fortunate that silver has no
sense of pain, for it has great afflictions to
endure on a refiner's premises!

So said my friend. He had no more sounding
name for this wonderful place, then,
than "a refiner's premises." I looked at the
master-refiners with awe. Very pleasant
gentlemen; crisp, wholesome, extremely intelligent,
and freely communicative. I remembered
to have heard that the celebrated
Tenth Regiment, after exhausting all other
means and appliances of expense, took to
wearing gold straps. Nothing of the kind
about the master-refiners—ordinary pantaloons
and boots, and no straps at all!

In the midst of so much gold, it seemed
quite an affability in the refiners not to
despise silver. There was a good deal of
silver: some of it, the various processes completed,
lying about on the dark floors, in
glittering bars like fish—precious herrings
or whitings. But it had a good deal to go
through, before it came to that. We stepped
into another room and saw a blast furnace
in the corner. Lead, and whatever dross
had silver in it, was here melted; the blast
was contrived to fall upon the scum and blew
it off as, in the world of ordinary dust (not
gold dust) one blows froth from porter.
Under the furnace, was a trough of artificial
stone—porous lime-stone made of pounded
bones; when the molten silver, still with lead
in combination, flowed upon this, the lead sunk
into it and left the silver nearly pure. On the
premises of the refiner nothing must be
wasted. The smooth iron floors must be
perpetually swept, and all the sweepings made to
yield whatever they contain of value. With
the silver there is often a little gold in
combination, that will be worth getting out. The
actual charge of the refiner, for his operation
on the gold committed to him, is not great;
on a small quantity it is very inconsiderable,
though on the whole year's operations it is,
of course, important; but, a great deal of
profit comes from the habit among refiners
of allowing nothing to be lost; they have the
right of getting any silver that may be with
gold that passes through their pots, or getting
any gold that may be had from silver.

We passed into a large and well-built hall,
with a light iron roof and ventilator, a floor
paved with iron, and a row, all round the
walls, of furnaces or ovens. Through these
ovens was a fierce draught. One of the oven
doors was opened and revealed a pot, bright
as the fire itself, among the glowing coals;
within the pot, was liquid silver in full boil.
It was taken out, cooled in a lump, and dragged
across the iron floor to the sledge-hammers.
Silver cools rapidly, beginning to cool at the
edges of the vessel, and then throwing up
from under the hardened crust a little heap of
miniature mountains through the liquid centre.
A piece of the great mass came to be again
tormented in the fire. It was put into another
pot—the pots used in the furnaces were
crucibles made of a mixture of black lead and
a certain kind of clay—and there was then
added to the silver one-third of its weight of
the gold dust, or of the gold in any other
form to be refined. An oven door was opened,