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existence of gold in the country around there can be no doubt. In 1868 the same explorer, Mauch, found gold at a spot considerably to the south east of this,—south of the Limpopo and the Tsetse district, just north of the Olifant's river and in the Transvaal. Then in 1871 Mr. Button found gold at Marabas Stad, not far to the west of Mauch's discovery, in the neighbourhood of which the mines at Eesteling are now being worked by an English Company. On the Marabas-Stad gold fields a printed report was made by Captain Elton in 1872, and a considerable sum of money must have been spent. The Eesteling reef is the only one at present worked in the neighbourhood. Captain Elton's report seems to promise much on the condition that a sufficient sum of money be raised to enable the district to be thoroughly "prospected" by an able body of fifty gold-miners for a period of six months. Captain Elton no doubt understood his subject, but the adequate means for the search suggested by him have not yet been raised. And, indeed, it is not thus that gold fields have been opened. The chances of success are too small for men in cold blood to subscribe money at a distance. The work has to be done by the gambling energy of men who rush to the spot trusting that they may individually grasp the gold, fill their pockets with the gold, and thus have in a few months, perhaps in a few days or hours, a superabundance of that which they have ever been desiring but which has always been so hard to get! The great Australian and Californian enterprises have always been commenced by rushes of individual miners to some favoured spot, and not by companies floated by sub-