A number of the travellers were free and independent. These, carrying all their property with them, usually made a day's journey of about twenty miles; then, after an _al-fresco_ meal, they lay down in the open-air, with their blankets wrapped like martial cloaks around them, and were lulled to sleep by the breezy murmurs of the wild bush. Others, ignorant of the obstacles they had to encounter, rushed away from town insufficiently supplied with provisions, and the few public-houses on the way became quickly packed to confusion by these half-famished wanderers, demanding food and drink. Many of the first arrivals on the fields soon found out that the life of a digger was not all honey, and, after a few bitter experiences, either went back to their old employments in the town, or adapted themselves to the requirements of the new order of things by supplying the diggers' camp with provisions--an occupation which was generally quite as lucrative as that of the average digger. Meanwhile, the fame of the Victorian gold-fields had circulated throughout the adjacent colonies. Very soon the tide of emigration was turned from the Turon mines, and flowed in the direction of Ballarat and its vicinity. It poured into the auriferous creeks in the shape of an immense living mass, every unit big with expectation, and bent on ferreting out and appropriating some fragment of the golden lodestone. The bush surrounding the diggings was quickly thinned of its timber--its red gum, stringy bark, and box trees serving as good fuel for the culinary fire of the digger. Even the tallest and most massive giants of the forest were not spared, and soon the scene was completely shorn of its pristine sylvan beauty. Verdant hillocks and grassy mounds, which in primeval days had been the peaceful browsing and grazing grounds of the kangaroo and its species, and the happy hunting grounds of their scarcely human enemy, the aboriginal black, were speedily changed into yellow-coloured upheavals, which from a distance presented to the interested spectator the lively appearance of great ant-hills warming with busy workers, who now dropped into pits cut in the slopes, and anon reappeared bearing heavy loads, with which they impetuously rushed to the turbid waters of the nearest gully.