Bendigo, April 23rd, 1854.

Before leaving the Yackandanda Creek, we made an endeavour to undertake a large sluicing concern. In the new act of Regulations for the Gold Fields there is a clause empowering the Government to grant leases of such portions of those fields as are worked out and abandoned by the ordinary digger. These, when they have ceased to remunerate the digger who works them in the ordinary fashion with a small party, and with cradle and tom, yet frequently contain sufficient gold to pay, and pay well, for working on a larger and more rapid scale. Where the digger by the cradle, or even by the tom, can put through a few cartloads of earth, the sluice will work out hundreds.

It will not pay the cradler or the tommer to put through much rough earth. He must carefully separate the auriferous strata from all else. This requires much time and labour, and the result is comparatively small. But the sluicer will come after him, and even out of the earth that he has cast aside as containing little or nothing, will obtain in the aggregate large quantities.

This is effected by bringing a strong stream of water to the spot, where he runs it through a long descent of wooden troughs into a capacious tom. The sluicers can therefore dig up and throw into this stream of water immense quantities of earth, which are borne away by it, carried down, dissolved, and all its auriferous particles separated before it reaches the tom.