By rail. Still in the colony of
Victoria. Stawell is in the gold-mining country. In the bank-safe was
half a peck of surface-gold--gold dust, grain gold; rich; pure in fact,
and pleasant to sift through one's fingers; and would be pleasanter if it
would stick. And there were a couple of gold bricks, very heavy to
handle, and worth $7,500 a piece. They were from a very valuable quartz
mine; a lady owns two-thirds of it; she has an income of $75,000 a month
from it, and is able to keep house.
The Stawell region is not productive of gold only; it has great
vineyards, and produces exceptionally fine wines. One of these
vineyards--the Great Western, owned by Mr. Irving--is regarded as a
model. Its product has reputation abroad. It yields a choice champagne
and a fine claret, and its hock took a prize in France two or three years
ago. The champagne is kept in a maze of passages under ground, cut in
the rock, to secure it an even temperature during the three-year term
required to perfect it. In those vaults I saw 120,000 bottles of
champagne. The colony of Victoria has a population of 1,000,000, and
those people are said to drink 25,000,000 bottles of champagne per year.
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