py and jolly and clever and good-natured and brave and honest
while he is drinking. Later on he drinks because he feels the reverse
of all these things when he is sober. He drinks to drown the past and
repentance. He doesn't know that a healthy-minded man doesn't waste
time in repenting. He doesn't know how easy it is to reform, and is
too weak-willed to try. He gets a muddled idea that the past can't be
mended. He finds it easy to get drink and borrow money on the strength
of his next quarter's allowance, so he soon gets a quarter or two
behind, and sometimes gets into trouble connected with borrowed money.
He drifts to the bush and drinks, to drown the past only. The past grows
blacker and blacker until it is a hell without repentance; and often the
black sheep gets to that state when a man dreads his sober hours. And
the end? Well, you see old Danny there, and you saw old Awful Example
back at Thomas's shanty--he's worse than Danny, if anything. Sometimes
the end comes sooner. I saw a young new-land-new-leaf man dying in a
cheap lodging-house in Sydney. He was a schoolmate of mine, by the
way. For six weeks he lay on his back and suffered as I never saw a
man suffer in this world; and I've seen some bad cases. They had to
chloroform him every time they wanted to move him. He had affected to
be hard and cynical, and I must say that he played it out to the end. It
was a strong character, a strong mind sodden and diseased with drink.
He never spoke of home and his people except when he was delirious.
He never spoke, even to me, of his mental agony. That was English home
training. You young Australians wouldn't understand it; most bushmen are
poets and emotional.

"My old schoolmate was shifted to the Sydney Hospital at last, and
consented to the amputation of one leg. But it was too late. He was gone
from the hips down. Drink--third-rate hotel and bush shanty drink--and
low debauchery."

Jack Barnes drew up his leg and rubbed it surreptitiously. He had "pins
and needles." Mitchell noticed and turned a chuckle into a grunt.

"Gentleman Once was a remittance man," continued Peter. "But before he
got very far he met an Australian girl in a boarding-house. Her mother
was the landlady. They were bush people who had drifted to the city. The
girl was pretty, intelligent and impulsive. She pitied him and nursed
him. He wasn't known as Gentleman Once then, he hadn't got far enough to
merit the nickname."

Peter paused. Prese