return he questioned Chapman about the place where he found the gold, and he volunteered to show Mr. Brentani and some friends the place. A party was accordingly m a d e up, consisting of some five or six friends. About three days after they had started, T h o m a s Chapman, to m y surprise, returned alone, and gave as his reason that he was afraid of the foreigners, and had given them the slip. H e said he wished to go to Sydney, where he had friends, and he proceeded there by a steamer, the "Shamrock," I believe. A rumour got abroad that Chapman had been made away with, and met an untimely end. I never again heard of him until 1874. In that year, he having heard that m y daughter, Mrs. Sabelberg, was living at St. Kilda, called at m y son-in-law's house, and m y daughter sent for m e to see him. Although time and privation had left their traces, I remembered him at once, and to m a k e quite sure I asked him several questions relating to incidents of his early life, which he answered without hesitation. Although in Australia during its palmy days, fortune had not smiled upon him, as he was poor, feeble, and apparently in ill-health. I helped him in a small way, and he afterwards proceeded to a station owned by M r . Buckley, of the firm of Buckley and N u n n , where he obtained employment, and very shortly afterwards I heard of his death." In M a y it was reported that a fencer named Nial had discovered auriferous indications in Gippsland, and had secured a piece of gold as big as a man's hand. In November, some young men, hailing from the Pyrenees, were in Belfast, and exhibited some gold specimens, which, they said, had been found between some rocks on the banks of a creek. Nothing noticeable transpired for several months, until the April of 1850, when another Pyreneean shepherd looked in at Brentani's, and displayed a bag of dust containing a small admixture of gold. H e gathered it at the Pyrenees, about seventy miles from the scene of " T o m m y ' s " good luck. Except an occasionally groundless rumour about some fabulous gold-finding, the yellow fever which prevailed so intermittently during the previous year, died out, and all thought of nuggets, samples and specimens passed away. T o produce so m u c h calmness in this respect a counter-excitement much contributed, for 1850 was the Separation year, and during its latter half Port Phillip reeled like a half-drunken man, filled with a delirium about the good things that were to come, and the political millennium to spring from the erection of a district into a self-governing colony, ravings resulting in vain but harmless delusions, dreams as far from being realized to-day as they were then.
MIRABILIS ANNUS.
Except old Father Time, who is seized of everything in the future as well as the past, no one in the colony could have the faintest notion, when the old year was rung out, of the wonders contained in the w o m b of the new year, that was rung in. There were no Spiritualists in Melbourne to invoke inspiration from the world of shadows, though there were two or three professional fortune-tellers, w h o pretended unerring powers of divination. There were also some astute "weatherwake" politicians, w h o assumed a faculty to prognose everything likely to happen; but no one was to be found capable of the roughest approximate guess of the extraordinary physical and social revolution which was close at hand, the crisis of which would have c o m m e n c e d just as the next new year would make its appearance. 1851 opened on the colony with a midsummer of unusual drought, parching hot winds, and a water-famine, only comparatively harmless, in consequence of the scattered nature of the squatting homesteads, the limited number of flocks and herds, and the total absence of that since well known and deserving class of the community k n o w n as selectors. January was arid and hungry, and the croakers sang out that the worst had not yet come. February appeared like some supernatural power bent on the destruction of the settlement, resolved to waste the length and breadth of the territory with fire and sword, leaving it a boundless desert of dust and ashes. The 6th of February, the baleful historic "Black Thursday," clothed in fire and sheeted in burning forests whose w.ld, angry flames and smoke eclipsed the sun in several places, can never be forgotten. It fell upon the young colony as if likely to crush it; and the people were so awestruck that it required some time before the panic caused by the shock could be shaken off, and the ordinary avocations of
