On the Track | Page 4

drunk two or three days at a time. And his wife caught him throwing
the money in one night, and there was a terrible row, and she left him;
and people always said it was all a mistake. But we couldn't see the
mistake then.
But I can hear that girl's voice through the night, twenty years ago:
Oh! the bloomin' heath, and the pale blue bell, In my bonnet then I
wore; And memory knows no brighter theme Than those happy days of
yore. Scotland! Land of chief and song! Oh, what charms to thee
belong!
And I am old enough to understand why poor Peter McKenzie -- who
was married to a Saxon, and a Tartar -- went and got drunk when the
bad girl sang "The Bonnie Hills of Scotland."
His anxious eye might look in vain For some loved form it knew!
. . . . .
And yet another thing puzzled us greatly at the time. Next door to the
bad girl's house there lived a very respectable family -- a family of
good girls with whom we were allowed to play, and from whom we got
lollies (those hard old red-and-white "fish lollies" that grocers sent
home with parcels of groceries and receipted bills). Now one washing
day, they being as glad to get rid of us at home as we were to get out,
we went over to the good house and found no one at home except the
grown-up daughter, who used to sing for us, and read "Robinson
Crusoe" of nights, "out loud", and give us more lollies than any of the
rest -- and with whom we were passionately in love, notwithstanding
the fact that she was engaged to a "grown-up man" -- (we reckoned he'd
be dead and out of the way by the time we were old enough to marry

her). She was washing. She had carried the stool and tub over against
the stick fence which separated her house from the bad house; and, to
our astonishment and dismay, the bad girl had brought HER tub over
against her side of the fence. They stood and worked with their
shoulders to the fence between them, and heads bent down close to it.
The bad girl would sing a few words, and the good girl after her, over
and over again. They sang very low, we thought. Presently the good
grown-up girl turned her head and caught sight of us. She jumped, and
her face went flaming red; she laid hold of the stool and carried it, tub
and all, away from that fence in a hurry. And the bad grown-up girl
took her tub back to her house. The good grown-up girl made us
promise never to tell what we saw -- that she'd been talking to a bad
girl -- else she would never, never marry us.
She told me, in after years, when she'd grown up to be a grandmother,
that the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing "Madeline"
that day.
I remember a dreadful story of a digger who went and shot himself one
night after hearing that bad girl sing. We thought then what a
frightfully bad woman she must be. The incident terrified us; and
thereafter we kept carefully and fearfully out of reach of her voice, lest
we should go and do what the digger did.
. . . . .
I have a dreamy recollection of a circus on Gulgong in the roaring days,
more than twenty years ago, and a woman (to my child-fancy a being
from another world) standing in the middle of the ring, singing:
Out in the cold world -- out in the street -- Asking a penny from each
one I meet; Cheerless I wander about all the day, Wearing my young
life in sorrow away!
That last line haunted me for many years. I remember being frightened
by women sobbing (and one or two great grown-up diggers also) that
night in that circus.
"Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now", was a sacred song
then, not a peg for vulgar parodies and more vulgar "business" for
fourth-rate clowns and corner-men. Then there was "The Prairie
Flower". "Out on the Prairie, in an Early Day" -- I can hear the digger's
wife yet: she was the prettiest girl on the field. They married on the sly
and crept into camp after dark; but the diggers got wind of it and rolled

up with gold-dishes, shovels, &c., &c., and gave them a real good
tinkettling in the old-fashioned style, and a nugget or two to start
housekeeping on. She had a very sweet voice.
Fair as a lily, joyous and free, Light of the prairie home was she.
She's a "granny" now, no doubt --