In keeping to personal
recollections I cannot, at the worst, be very protracted, for I quitted
public life in 1853, and regretfully, under the calls of business, the
colony itself four years later. I must confine myself to some few
recollections of the former brief but busy period--1851-3--of which, in
its multifarious rush of political and general business, I might say in
the well-known words of the Roman poet, which have survived my classic
rust "quorum pars magna fui," provided I were allowed to greatly abate,
or rather perhaps, in becoming modesty, altogether to delete, the third
factor of Virgil's sentence.
The goldfields came upon us with almost the suddenness of the changes of
dreamland. We had had a slight graduation by the news, in the May
preceding, from the sister colony, of a shepherd on Dr. Kerr's station,
near Bathurst, having come upon a round hundredweight of nearly pure
gold. This luck, I presume, was mainly the result of the habit most of
us had begun to acquire of keeping our eyes upon the ground beneath us,
in consequence of Hargreaves, on his return from California about this
time, having predicted gold, and subsequently fulfilled his prophecy by
washing out some of the precious metal in the Bathurst vicinities.
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