While the Billy Boils | Page 3

the
diggings--was married, and had her wedding-ring made out of the gold
of that field; and how the diggers weighed their gold with the new
wedding-ring--for luck--by hanging the ring on the hook of the scales
and attaching their chamois-leather gold bags to it (whereupon she
boasted that four hundred ounces of the precious metal passed through
her wedding-ring); and how they lowered the young bride, blindfolded,
down a golden hole in a big bucket, and got her to point out the drive
from which the gold came that her ring was made out of. The point of
this story seems to have been lost--or else we forget it--but it was
characteristic. Had the girl been lowered down a duffer, and asked to
point out the way to the gold, and had she done so successfully, there

would have been some sense in it.
And they would talk of King, and Maggie Oliver, and G. V. Brooke,
and others, and remember how the diggers went five miles out to meet
the coach that brought the girl actress, and took the horses out and
brought her in in triumph, and worshipped her, and sent her off in glory,
and threw nuggets into her lap. And how she stood upon the box-seat
and tore her sailor hat to pieces, and threw the fragments amongst the
crowd; and how the diggers fought for the bits and thrust them inside
their shirt bosoms; and how she broke down and cried, and could in her
turn have worshipped those men--loved them, every one. They were
boys all, and gentlemen all. There were college men, artists, poets,
musicians, journalists--Bohemians all. Men from all the lands and one.
They understood art--and poverty was dead.
And perhaps the old mate would say slyly, but with a sad, quiet smile:
"Have you got that bit of straw yet, Tom?"
Those old mates had each three pasts behind them. The two they told
each other when they became mates, and the one they had shared.
And when the visitor had gone by the coach we noticed that the old
man would smoke a lot, and think as much, and take great interest in
the fire, and be a trifle irritable perhaps.
Those old mates of our father's are getting few and far between, and
only happen along once in a way to keep the old man's memory fresh,
as it were. We met one to-day, and had a yarn with him, and afterwards
we got thinking, and somehow began to wonder whether those ancient
friends of ours were, or were not, better and kinder to their mates than
we of the rising generation are to our fathers; and the doubt is painfully
on the wrong side.

SETTLING ON THE LAND
The worst bore in Australia just now is the man who raves about
getting the people on the land, and button-holes you in the street with a
little scheme of his own. He generally does not know what he is talking
about.
There is in Sydney a man named Tom Hopkins who settled on the land
once, and sometimes you can get him to talk about it. He did very well
at his trade in the city, years ago, until he began to think that he could
do better up-country. Then he arranged with his sweetheart to be true to

him and wait whilst he went west and made a home. She drops out of
the story at this point.
He selected on a run at Dry Hole Creek, and for months awaited the
arrival of the government surveyors to fix his boundaries; but they
didn't come, and, as he had no reason to believe they would turn up
within the next ten years, he grubbed and fenced at a venture, and
started farming operations.
Does the reader know what grubbing means? Tom does. He found the
biggest, ugliest, and most useless trees on his particular piece of ground;
also the greatest number of adamantine stumps. He started without
experience, or with very little, but with plenty of advice from men who
knew less about farming than he did. He found a soft place between
two roots on one side of the first tree, made a narrow, irregular hole,
and burrowed down till he reached a level where the tap-root was
somewhat less than four feet in diameter, and not quite as hard as flint:
then he found that he hadn't room to swing the axe, so he heaved out
another ton or two of earth--and rested. Next day he sank a shaft on the
other side of the gum; and after tea, over a pipe, it struck him that it
would be a good idea to burn the tree out, and so use up the logs and
lighter rubbish lying