e helped fix some stalls for a Catholic Church bazaar, and
some of the chaps chaffed him about it in the union office.

"You'll be taking up a collection for a joss-house down in the
Chinamen's camp next," said Tom Hall in conclusion.

"Well, I ain't got nothin' agen the Roming Carflics," said the Giraffe.
"An' Father O'Donovan's a very decent sort of cove. He stuck up for the
unions all right in the strike anyway." ("He wouldn't be Irish if he
wasn't," someone commented.) "I carried swags once for six months with
a feller that was a Carflick, an' he was a very straight feller. And
a girl I knowed turned Carflick to marry a chap that had got her into
trouble, an' she was always jes' the same to me after as she was before.
Besides, I like to help everything that's goin' on."

Tom Hall and one or two others went out hurriedly to have a drink. But
we all loved the Giraffe.

He was very innocent and very humorous, especially when he meant to be
most serious and philosophical.

"Some of them bush girls is regular tomboys," he said to me solemnly
one day. "Some of them is too cheeky altogether. I remember once I was
stoppin' at a place--they was sort of relations o' mine--an' they put me
to sleep in a room off the verander, where there was a glass door an'
no blinds. An' the first mornin' the girls--they was sort o' cousins
o' mine--they come gigglin' and foolin' round outside the door on the
verander, an' kep' me in bed till nearly ten o'clock. I had to put me
trowsis on under the bed-clothes in the end. But I got back on 'em the
next night," he reflected.

"How did you do that, Bob?" I asked.

"Why, I went to bed in me trowsis!"

One day I was on a plank, painting the ceiling of the bar of the Great
Western Hotel. I was anxious to get the job finished. The work had been
kept back most of the day by chaps handing up long beers to me, and
drawing my attention to the alleged fact that I was putting on the paint
wrong side out. I was slapping it on over the last few boards when:

"I'm very sorry to trouble yer; I always seem to be troublin' yer; but
there's that there woman and them girls----"

I looked down--about the first time I had looked down on him--and there
was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two half-crowns
in it.

"Oh, that's all right, Bob," I said, and I dropped in half a crown.

There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some barracking.
It appeared that that there wo