Weekly journal-miner., 1909-10-06
LARGE FORTUNES PICKED
 UP BY LUCKY MINERS

i NoWhere does fortune lndulge hel
 love of the dramatic and the sensa
 tional more fully than in the gold
 fields and the silver mines, the story
 of which is crowded with incident:
 so startling that even the most dar
 ing writer might well hesitate to in troduce them into his fiction.
 Take, for instance, the story ot
 the discovery of the world-famOus
 Blanche Barkley" nugget in the early days of Australian gold mining
 which sent a thrill round the world
 Samuel Napier, a sailor, with his brother, Charles, and one Robert Am
 prose, their cook and general handy
 man, had been digging for gold for
 six months at Kingower, about 40
 miles from. Bendigo, without discover
 ing as much of the precious metal as
 would pay their living expenses, when
 one August day, to tell the story in
 Napier's own words, "we made the " AS "C hiu
 II feet to the pipe-elay stratum and
 were shuffling around in the bottom of the shaft, more dead than alive from the heat Old Ambrose lit his pipe and leaned against the side of the hole for a rest. Just then I struck something with my pick. turned it up so the light could strike it, and, by Jimmy it was a chunk of gold as big as a Hubbard squash!
 "That evening was a mighty anx- 'ious one, for the boys were liable to liquidate. and we didn't know what minute they'd come in and turn our whole caboose upside down. About midnight we set to work as quiet as possible with our picks and sunk n shaft down about six feet under meath the table in the tent and buried the nugget out of sight. For three long months it stayed there, with us eating over it, walking over it, sleep ing on it, and dreaming on it, anc not soul at the diggings any the wiser. Sometimes we lay awake all night with our guns handy in case we were molested, for there were plenty of tough subjects at the 6ig- gings that would have made short work of us if they had guessed our seeret.' The nugget sold for f7,oOO.
 Among the thousands who floeked to the Victorian gold fields ;n the early sos were two Cornish miners, John DeasOn and Richard Oates, who staked out a claim near the village of MOliaque. They set to work with vlgor, confident that in a few months they would be able to retire to their native Cornwall rich men, but their were doomed to cruel disappointment. Not only months but many years passed, and found them still as far removed from fortune as at the beginning; and by 1869, fiji | teen years after they began their search for gold, they were reduced to the last straits Starvation stared | hem in the face; and the erowning misfortune came when a local store keeper refused to supply Deason with ! little flour until he produced the money for it.
 In despair the miner seized his pick md wandered away to the outskirts If the gold field; and as he wandered lowncast and heavy-hearted, he mo- iced a gleam of yellow in a rut made " a peddler's cart. Lifting his pick, with a few frantic blows he brought O light an enormous nugget, which 7ith all his strength, he could barely aise an inch from the ground The ugget, which was soon known the whole world over as the "Weleome tranger," actually weighed two hun redweight and was sold for nearly 10000.