A LUCKY FOSSICKER.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 71, 26 March 1910, Page 14

A LUCKY FOSSICKER.

A fosHcker named David Barnard met with remarkably good luck at Ballarat a few days ago, aswvas briefly mentioned in a cable message. According to a Melbourne paper, he was sluicing among the abandoned workings at Pennyweight Hill, near the Eureka Stockade, when lie found in the sluice a big nugget, weighing in the rough 128oz, which being melted at the school of mines, produced 108oz of pure gold, valued at about £450. The golden specimen was early in the day exhibited in the window of the office of Mr. F. W. Hoist, at the Mining Exchange, and was admired by a large number of persons. Barnard was one of the 200 triputers recently locked out by the introducing of the new tribute agreement of the Minister of Mines, and was filling in his time prospecting the old diggings pending permanent employment at a local mine. The place where the nugget was found is close to the spot where the Lady Barkly nugget was located on 7th February, 1854. The Lady Barkly nugget weighed 6250z. In the vicinity were also found the Nil Desperandum nugget on 29th November, 1857, weighing 5400z ; the Sarah Sande, on Bth September, 1854. weighing 1178oz, and the Canadian, on 11th January, 1863, weighing 16190z. Barnard, who is an unmarried man, has now pegged out a claim in the vicinity of his sluice. He was living in poor circumstances, and started work, he says, ia the old diggings in the hope of making tucker.

The Book Monthly discovers that it is the lighter kind of fiction which is most frequently stolen from a public library. Religious books are frequently taken, but poetry is not often purloined, either because verse lovers are honest, or b«cause it is hard to turn a copper by selling an ordinary volume of_ verse.