From one fraction, only twelve feet by twelve feet, at Gravel Bend, one hundred and twenty-five pounds weight of gold was taken out in less than thirty days. Another syndicate of eight men, working nearby, pocketed one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The Prince claim was leased for one week and yielded about eighty thousand dollars; then, for a two-week period, yielding forty-five thousand dollars. Before the end of the year 1851 over thirty thousand miners were working in the Victoria goldfields. In the following year this province alone yielded gold to the value of forty-eight million dollars, and in the succeeding year one hundred and five million dollars, and this golden flood spelled prosperity to the whole of Australia. Australia too, startled the imagination of the world by the large size of the chunks of gold occasionally found. For several years the industry of mining was mostly a matter of luck. It was a tenderfoot’s paradise. Barbers had equal chance with geologists, and jockeys with experienced miners. There is no other example in the history of mining such a succession of great nuggets. One expert has made a calculation of the world’s famous nuggets, one hundred and fifty in number. Of these one hundred and nineteen were found in Australia, the United States trailing along a poor second with only nine. The “Welcome Stranger” nugget, found at Dunolly, only a few inches below the surface, was a block of gold twenty-four inches long and ten inches thick and yielded two thousand, two hundred and forty-eight ounces of pure gold, valued at just under forty-nine thousand dollars. The “Welcome” nugget, found at Ballarat, weighed two thousand, two hundred and seventeen ounces and was sold for forty-six thousand dollars. The “Blanche Barkly,” picked up at Kingower, at a depth of only fifteen feet, yielded seventeen hundred and forty-three ounces and was worth thirty-four thousand dollars. Another, weighing sixteen hundred and nineteen ounces, was part of a small rock slide that rolled into Canadian Gully. This nugget was picked up by a widow just out from England and forthwith sold for twenty-six thousand dollars. This fortunate woman was of the stuff that make real pioneers. She had a family to support and, hearing of the Australian goldfields, she stowed her family aboard a sailing ship and came--and in the fifties a voyage more than half way around the world was no picnic. It could be said of her in truth, “She came; she saw; she conquered”--for the finding of this nugget was only the beginning. “What any man can do, I can do,” she said, and she did, both in Australia and in England, where, for thirty years after, she was a power in financial and social circles.