"There ain't no fear of me starvin' so long as I've got me hands about
me; an' I ain't a cove as wants thanks," said the Giraffe.

He was always helping someone or something. Now it was a bit of a
"darnce" that we was gettin' up for the girls; again it was Mrs Smith,
the woman whose husban' was drowned in the flood in the Began River
lars' Crismas, or that there poor woman down by the Billabong--her
husband cleared out and left her with a lot o' kids. Or Bill Something,
the bullocky, who was run over by his own wagon, while he was drunk, and
got his leg broke.

Toward the end of his spree One-eyed Began broke loose and smashed
nearly all the windows of the Carriers' Arms, and next morning he was
fined heavily at the police court. About dinner-time I encountered the
Giraffe and his hat, with two half-crowns in it for a start.

"I'm sorry to trouble yer," he said, "but One-eyed Bogan carn't pay his
fine, an' I thought we might fix it up for him. He ain't half a bad sort
of feller when he ain't drinkin'. It's only when he gets too much booze
in him."

After shearing, the hat usually started round with the Giraffe's own
dirty crumpled pound note in the bottom of it as a send-off, later on it
was half a sovereign, and so on down to half a crown and a shilling,
as he got short of stuff; till in the end he would borrow a "few
bob"--which he always repaid after next shearing-"just to start the
thing goin'."

There were several yarns about him and his hat. 'Twas said that the hat
had belonged to his father, whom he resembled in every respect, and it
had been going round for so many years that the crown was worn as thin
as paper by the quids, half-quids, casers, half-casers, bobs and tanners
or sprats--to say nothing of the scrums--that had been chucked into it
in its time and shaken up.

They say that when a new governor visited Bourke the Giraffe happened to
be standing on the platform close to the exit, grinning good-humouredly,
and the local toady nudged him urgently and said in an awful whisper,
"Take off your hat! Why don't you take off your hat?"

"Why?" drawled the Giraffe, "he ain't hard up, is he?"

And they fondly cherish an anecdote to the effect that, when the
One-Man-One-Vote Bill was passed (or Payment of Members, or when the
first Labour Party went in--I forget on which occasion they said it was)
the Giraffe was carried away by the general enthusiasm, got a few beers
in him, "chucked" a quid into his hat