can preach."

* Hard manual labour.

"Wasn't there some talk about her and the Black Police officer being
engaged?" said the hawker, who was a great retailer of bush gossip.

"Wasn't there some talk of you havin' done time for trying to do the
fire insurance people?" angrily retorted Young, who was wroth at the
hawker's familiar way of speaking of the goddess of Fraser's Gully.

"It vasn't me at all," protested the hawker. "It vas another Isaac
Benjamin altogether."

"What did he do?" asked Cockney Smith.

"He had a store in Brisbane," said Young, "and insured the stock for
about two thousand quid,{*} and made an awful fuss about his being so
careful of fire. He bought about fifty of them round glass bottles full
of a sort of stuff called fire exstinker--bottles that you can hang up
on a nail with a bit of string, or put on shelves, or anywhere, and if a
place catches on fire, they burst, and the exstinker liquid sends out a
sort of gas which puts out a fire in no time. One'll do the trick.

* "Quid": L1.

"Well, this chap--of course it isn't your fault, Ikey, that your name is
the same as his--was dead set on getting that two thousand quid for his
stock, which was only worth about five hundred. But he was such a downy
cove--did you ever come acrost him, Ikey?"

"No, never," emphatically replied the hawker, "and he vasn't no relation
of mine either."

"Well, as I was saying, he was always making a fearful fuss about a
fire, and as he was a member of the Fire Brigade Board, he was always
bringing forward ressylutions at the Committee meetings for a better
water supply, and all that sort of thing, and he gave a five pound note
to the driver of the fire engine because he was a temperance man of
fifteen years' standing, and set a noble example to the Brigade. Did you
hear about that, Ikey?"

"No, I didn't," answered the hawker uneasily.

"Well, he did. He hated liquor in any shape or form, he said, and
wouldn't sell any in his store on no account whatever, and wanted all
the Fire Brigade men and other public servants to take the pledge. And
the noosepapers said he was a great-hearted phillyanthropist.

"He had two boys in the store to help him--was it two, Ikey?"

"I don't remember, Mr Young. I vas never much interested in reading
about rogueries of any kind."

"Just so! Well, one Sunday night one of the boys came back to the store
for suthin' or other, and he sees you--I mean the feller as has