, and dust. I'd growl now if I had a thousand a year. We MUST
growl, swear, and some of us drink to d.t.'s, or go mad sober.

"Pants and shirts stiff with grease as though a couple of pounds of soft
black putty were spread on with a painter's knife.

"No, gentle bard!--we don't sing at our work. Over the whirr and roar
and hum all day long, and with iteration that is childish and irritating
to the intelligent greenhand, float unthinkable adjectives and adverbs,
addressed to jumbucks, jackaroos, and mates indiscriminately. And worse
words for the boss over the board--behind his back.

"I came of a Good Christian Family--perhaps that's why I went to the
Devil. When I came out here I'd shrink from the man who used foul
language. In a short time I used it with the worst. I couldn't help it.

"That's the way of it. If I went back to a woman's country again I
wouldn't swear. I'd forget this as I would a nightmare. That's the
way of it. There's something of the larrikin about us. We don't exist
individually. Off the board, away from the shed (and each other) we are
quiet--even gentle.

"A great-horned ram, in poor condition, but shorn of a heavy fleece,
picks himself up at the foot of the 'shoot', and hesitates, as if
ashamed to go down to the other end where the ewes are. The most
ridiculous object under Heaven.

"A tar-boy of fifteen, of the bush, with a mouth so vile that
a street-boy, same age (up with a shearing uncle), kicks him
behind--having proved his superiority with his fists before the shed
started. Of which unspeakable little fiend the roughest shearer of a
rough shed was heard to say, in effect, that if he thought there was
the slightest possibility of his becoming the father of such a boy
he'd----take drastic measures to prevent the possibility of his becoming
a proud parent at all.

"Twice a day the cooks and their familiars carry buckets of
oatmeal-water and tea to the shed, two each on a yoke. We cry, 'Where
are you coming to, my pretty maids?'

"In ten minutes the surfaces of the buckets are black with flies. We
have given over trying to keep them clear. We stir the living cream
aside with the bottoms of the pints, and guzzle gallons, and sweat it
out again. Occasionally a shearer pauses and throws the perspiration
from his forehead in a rain.

"Shearers live in such a greedy rush of excitement that often a strong
man will, at a prick of the shears, fall in a death-like faint on the
board.

"We