tled and
grated; the noise of the spades, chopping the gravel into the
puddling-tubs or the Long Toms, was like the scrunch of shingle under
waves. The fierce yelping of the dogs chained to the flag-posts of
stores, mongrels which yapped at friend and foe alike, supplied a note
of earsplitting discord.

But except for this it was a wholly mechanical din. Human brains
directed operations, human hands carried them out, but the sound of the
human voice was, for the most part, lacking. The diggers were a sombre,
preoccupied race, little given to lip-work. Even the "shepherds," who,
in waiting to see if their neighbours struck the lead, beguiled the
time with euchre and "lambskinnet," played moodily, their mouths glued
to their pipe-stems; they were tail-on-end to fling down the cards for
pick and shovel. The great majority, ant-like in their indefatigable
busyness, neither turned a head nor looked up: backs were bent, eyes
fixed, in a hard scrutiny of cradle or tin-dish: it was the earth that
held them, the familiar, homely earth, whose common fate it is to be
trodden heedlessly underfoot. Here, it was the loadstone that drew all
men's thoughts. And it took toll of their bodies in odd, exhausting
forms of labour, which were swift to weed out the unfit.

The men at the windlasses spat into their horny palms and bent to the
crank: they paused only to pass the back of a hand over a sweaty
forehead, or to drain a nose between two fingers. The barrow-drivers
shoved their loads, the bones of their forearms standing out like ribs.
Beside the pools, the puddlers chopped with their shovels; some even
stood in the tubs, and worked the earth with their feet, as
wine-pressers trample grapes. The cradlers, eternally rocking with one
hand, held a long stick in the other with which to break up any clods a
careless puddler might have deposited in the hopper. Behind these came
the great army of fossickers, washers of surface-dirt, equipped with
knives and tin-dishes, and content if they could wash out
half-a-pennyweight to the dish. At their heels still others, who
treated the tailings they threw away. And among these last was a
sprinkling of women, more than one with an infant sucking at her
breast. Withdrawn into a group for themselves worked a body of Chinese,
in loose blue blouses, flappy blue leg-bags and huge conical straw
hats. They, too, fossicked and re-washed, using extravagant quantities
of water.

Thus the pale-eyed multitud