actually packed a flour barrel with stores, pierced the whole concern with an axle, and rolled or dragged it the whole painful way to Coolgardie. Men walked blindly into the unmapped desert in search of an utterly imaginary Golconda of the moment known as Mount Youle, and found Kalgoorlie, and then did not know what they had found. Every one who could afford it carried his own condenser, because the only permanent water "out back" was salt. The extraordinary reports that came down to the coast were but half believed for some time in Perth itself. Miss Flora Shaw, who was investigating Australia for the Times, was not allowed even to visit Western Australia, and the London papers ignored the rush as long as they could. But a few of the better informed, chiefly from Piccadilly, of all places, found their way out, and met with their reward. They were followed by "mining experts," newspaper correspondents, "agents of the Rothschilds," and the rest. Everything that could be sold or floated was floated or sold, in Adelaide, or locally; in London, or to the French. Prospectors on foot and on horseback, with camels and on bicycles, spread themselves all over the interior; living and looking for gold where a few years before well-equipped expeditions of experienced and scientific explorers had found it difficult to penetrate. Boilers and machinery were dragged through the silence and desolation of the bush to far outlying mines, which in some cases have been left once again to desolation and silence. For before long the boom subsided. The excitement of the market had passed. That strange community of the prospectors of Australasia, the best gold-finders of the world, whose coming to any country is always followed by discoveries which without them might have remained for ever overlooked, and who had reserved, as it were,
