United States or Malta ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Long lines of white tents overtop the heaps of pipeclay, which grow higher from day to day. The men are hard at work on these hills of "mullock," plying the windlasses by which the stuff is brought up from below, or puddling and washing off "the dirt."

And now a wretched little pastoral town; a collection of glaring corrugated-iron hip-roofs, and maybe a rotting propped-up bark or weather-board humpy or two relics of the roaring days; a dried-up storekeeper and some withered hags; a waste of caved-in holes with rain-washed mullock heaps and quartz and gravel glaring in the sun; thistles and burrs where old bars were; drought, dryness, desolation and goats.

"I was in a bit o' a mullock," Private James Akroyd's letter went on, "t' last time we were i' t' trenches; 'twern't mich to tell abaat, but 'twere hot while it lasted. There's lads says I'm baan to get a V.C. But don't thou hark tul 'em; V.C.'s are noan for t' likes o' me. "Jim." "Is that all?" asked Annie, as her mother folded up the letter.

Strange to say, in spite of his drunken habits, his credit was as good as that of any man in the town. He was very unsociable, seldom speaking, whether drunk or sober; but a weary, hard-up sundowner was always pretty certain to get a meal and a shake-down at Bogg's lonely but among the mullock heaps.

The black boy leaped to the back-seat, and in a moment the buggy swerved by the bullock-dray that was drawn up a little further down the road, and the excited horses galloped past the nineteen public houses and the zinc-roofed shanties, past the new quarter of tents and whirring machinery, past the deserted shafts and desolate mullock heaps, then way out along the sandy wheel-track into the unpopulated Bush.

Tom could fight." "Did you travel long with him after that?" "Ten years." "And where is he now?" "Dead Give us the matches." It was Golden Gully still, but golden in name only, unless indeed the yellow mullock heaps or the bloom of the wattle-trees on the hillside gave it a claim to the title.

Mullock, in her little shop, where toffey, toys, and penny books for young people were sold, together with baskets, tea-cups, straw-mats, and other adult ware; and he was so friendly and talked so beautifully, and although, as he admitted in his lofty way, 'there might be differences in fortune and position, yet were we not all members of one body?

They carried me on their broad shoulders, stuffed me with lollies and made a general pet of me. Without the quiver of a nerve I swung down their deepest shafts in the big bucket on the end of a rope attached to a rough windlass, which brought up the miners and the mullock. My brothers and sisters contracted mumps, measles, scarlatina, and whooping-cough.

Seen nearer at hand, the dun-coloured desert resolved itself into uncountable pimpling clay and mud-heaps, of divers shade and varying sizes: some consisted of but a few bucketfuls of mullock, others were taller than the tallest man.

Bishop Mullock, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Newfoundland, was lying becalmed in his yacht one day in sight of Cape Breton Island, and began to dream of a plan for uniting his savage diocese to the mainland by a line of telegraph through the forest from St. John's to Cape Ray, and cables across the mouth of the St. Lawrence from Cape Ray to Nova Scotia. St.