Читать книгу The Last Chance: A Tale of the Golden West онлайн

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‘Doubtless there is, but delays occur, protracted ssss1 not infrequently within our experience, until the prodigal, like his prototype, is reduced to dire distress and unbefitting occupation. In our respected comrade’s case the fickle goddess has again smiled on his enterprise. Let us trust that he will learn from the past to be independent of her moods for the future. The senior shareholder, well known and respected as a Goldfields Warden in another State, has gone east to arrange for the necessary machinery, and the thousand-and-one requisites for a quartz-crushing plant of fifty stamps, with everything, up to the latest date, in the way of metallurgical reduction. No time will be lost in getting it on the ground, and the results will be, it may be confidently stated by this journal, such as will startle the mining world, and give fresh impetus to all industrial occupation in our midst.’

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At home once more. What a blessed sound! comprehensive, endearing, filled with the domestic joys which wife and children supply—a joy such as no other earthly pleasure can simulate. The Commissioner was ‘once more on his native heath,’ so to speak; and as he walked into his well-remembered office, earlier than usual, in order to take a leisurely survey of the great mass of papers, private and official, which awaited his return, and noted the gathering crowd which had already formed around the Court House door, a certain feeling of regret arose in his mind at the idea that his ministerial and judicial functions were about to cease and determine within so short ssss1 a time. True, at times his position had been one of great, even painful responsibility.