ABSTRACT

Month after month the pioneers in the Lydenburg districts worked on, sometimes elated by success, which cheered their spirits, and brightened their prospects, as with a gleam of sunlight; and at other times depressed by long, and almost fruitless labour, while their discomfort was enhanced by the high price and precarious supply even of the necessaries of life; as well as by the impossibility of building permanent, or even tolerably comfortable, habitations, while no actually “payable field,” on which it would answer a mans purpose to settle down to steady work, had yet been discovered. After a week’s initiatory digging at Spitz Kop, Mr. Maclean accompanied last of the diggers to McLachlan’s farm, twenty or twenty-five miles north, and found the creek occupied by promising diggings for about two miles of its length. In the course of September it was reported that Mr. Honeyman found a liugget weighing ten ounces, and that several others of considerable size had been found.