there may be. It is not enough to tell me that
you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way
of transgressors may be hard in many respects. The humblest observer who
goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of
a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages
of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he
has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there,
that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where
the fact is not so obvious.

After reading Hewitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one
evening, I had in my mind's eye, all night, the numerous valleys, with
their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet
deep, and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and
partly filled with water,--the locality to which men furiously rush to
probe for their fortunes,--uncertain where they shall break ground,--not
knowing but the gold is under their camp itself,--sometimes digging one
hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it
by a foot,--turned into demons, and regardless of each other's rights,
in their thirst for riches,--whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly
honey-combed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are
drowned in them,--standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they
work night and day, dying of exposure and disease. Having read this, and
partly forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own
unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and with that vision of the
diggings still before me, I asked myself, why _I_ might not be washing
some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles,--why _I_
might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine.
_There_ is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you,--what though it were a
sulky-gully? At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and
narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.
Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in
this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary
travellers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path
across-lots will turn out the _higher way_ of the two.

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be
found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme
to where it lies. They go prospe