country would be in receipt of a thousand new faces every day. The road from Melbourne was so bad that drays could hardly get over portions of it. THE FIRST MELBOURNE COACH
Was started by Mr. James Watt, the landlord of the Border Inn, at Bacchus Marsh. It was to ply twice a week between Melbourne and Ballarat, leaving the corner of Elizabeth and Lonsdale Streets every Monday and Thursday at 2 p.m., arriving at Ballarat at 3 p.m. on Tuesday and Friday; returning at 8 a.m. on Wednesday and Saturday, and arriving in Melbourne at 10 a.m. on Thursday and Monday. Fare, each way, 25s., with moderate charges for parcels, and all booked, if not exceeding 5 lbs., would be carefully conveyed. The coach commenced running on the 6th of October, and its hoggings and breakdowns would fill a volume, though no deaths, and hardly any broken bones, were to be laid to its charge. N o doubt the slowness of pace and the softness of the road had a great deal to do in averting dangerous accidents.
BALLARAT IN ITS GLORY.
The accounts from Ballarat were so astounding as to unsettle the equanimity of the most unimpressionable Stoic ; not mere rumour, but great golden facts of undoubted reliability. Mr. J. D. Hill, a gentleman of unquestioned veracity, thus wrote (30th September) to Messrs. Russell and Thomas, architects and surveyors, in Melbourne :—" Every m a n here (at Ballarat) is doing well, and our party in four days took 80 lbs. weight of gold out of one hole, and Goodness knows how much more there may be left there." The Ballarat correspondent of the Geelong Advertiser forwarded the most glowing description of the place, and declared the general average yield to each man to be upwards of an ounce and a-quarter per day. His letters were not only gilded, but saturated with gold, and from one dated 29th September I extract a "specimen," viz.:— "If Fortunatus had thrown the contents of his cap over the lands of Ballarat, the yield of riches would not have been increased. Here strata are delved into for riches, which repay a thousand-fold the labour expended upon them. The yield is immense, and seemingly inexhaustible. The gold lays in 'pockets' in the blue slatey clay, and may be picked out with a knife-point. So rich indeed is it that many have abandoned cradle workings for tin dishes, which have yielded from two to three ounces in the washing. Many will make fortunes, hundreds a competency, and the vast majority will do wel1 I bttle thought when I first started to Buninyong that it would fall to m y lot to chronicle facts which, if embodied in romance, or made the elements of a fairy tale, would have excited a smile of incredulity. • The month of September, 1851, is the most eventful epoch in the history of Victoria. It will stand in golden letters in our Kalend, and will be a datum line to start on our new career of prosperity." O n the Ballarat diggings there was a picturesque hill, which soon became a grand focus of attraction. From its riches it was known as "Golden Point"; but it was quickly burrowed into, spoiled of its beauty, and reft of its treasures. One man, in a delirium of rejoicing, wrote to a friend in Melbourne :— " I would not change m y eight-feet square (the space allotted to a digger by his license) for a squatter's station on the Murray." Geelong, ever prone to super-exultation, was almost beside itself, and anticipated wonders from the Ballarat developments. It regarded the Buninyong and Ballarat territory as a Geelongese dependency, all because these places happened to be a few miles nearer to it than to Melbourne. Indeed the Advertiser complacently designated them "Our Geelong Diggings," and endeavoured to screw much capital out of the circumstance that, though they were fifty miles from Geelong, they were eighty from Melbourne; and because the road from Melbourne was so gullied that the mail to Buninyong had for a time to travel circuitously via Geelon-
