rance for an experienced mining engineer of thirty-five.
In fact, the great man after staring hard at his new acquisition burst
out with English directness, "How remarkable you Americans are. You have
not yet learned to grow old, either individually or as a nation. Now
you, for example, do not look a day over twenty-five. How the devil do
you do it?"

The days were days of wonder for the homegrown young Quaker engineer.
Across America, across the ocean, then the stupendous metropolis of the
world and the great business men of the "city," with week-ends under the
wing of the big mining financier at beautiful English country houses
with people whose names spelled history. And then the P. and O. boat to
Marseilles, Naples, Port Said, Aden, and Colombo, and finally to be put
ashore in a basket on a rope cable over a very rough sea at Albany in
West Australia. There he was consigned, with the dozen other first-class
passengers, mining adventurers like himself, to quarantine in a tent
hospital on a sand spit out in the harbor with the thermometer never
registering below three figures, even at night.

And then he came to the Australian mine fields themselves in a desert
where the temperature can keep above one hundred degrees day and night
for three weeks together. Also there is wind, scorching wind carrying
scorching dust. And surface water discoverable only every fifty or sixty
miles. Of course one expects a desert to be hot and dry--that's why it
is a desert--but the West Australian desert rather overemphasizes the
necessities of the case. It is a deadly monotonous country although not
wholly bare; there is much low brush just high enough to hide you from
others only half a mile away; a place easy to get lost in, and hard to
get found in when once lost.

All of this desert was being prospected by thousands of men of a dozen
nationalities, all seeking and suffering, for gold. The railroad had got
in only as far as Coolgardie, but the prospectors were far beyond the
rail head. They carried their water bags with enough in them to keep
themselves and their horses alive between water holes. In the real "back
blocks" they could not carry enough for horses, so they used camels
with jangling bells and gaudy trappings of gay greens, orange, scarlet,
and vivid blues, making strange contrasts with the blue-gray bush. Along
the few main roads moved dusty stages, light, low, almost spring-less
three-seated vehicles, with thin sun-tops