done nothing, your worship, and I don't want nothing."

"But you should do something," replied the magistrate; "we don't want
idle vagabonds like you wandering about the country. You will be
sent to gaol for three months."

I stood up and reminded the justice respectfully that there was as
yet no evidence against the prisoner, so, as a matter of form, he
condescended to hear the constable, who went into the witness-box and
proved his case to the hilt. He had found the man at nightfall
sitting under the shelter of some tea-tree sticks before a fire;
asked him what he was doing there; said he was camping out; had come
from Melbourne looking for work; was a blacksmith; took him in charge
as a vagrant, and locked him up; all his property was the clothes he
wore, an old blanket, a tin billy, a clasp knife, a few crusts of
bread, and old pipe, and half a fig of tobacco; could find no money
about him.

That last fact settled the matter. A man travelling about the bush
without money is a deep-dyed criminal. I had done it myself, and so
was able to measure the extent of such wickedness. I never felt
really virtuous unless I had some money in my pocket.

"You are sentenced to imprisonment for three months in Melbourne
gaol," said the magistrate; "and mind you don't come here again."

"I ain't done nothing, your worship," replied the prisoner; "and I
don't want nothing."

"Take him away, constable."

Seven years afterwards, as I was riding home about sundown through
Tarraville, I observed a solitary swagman sitting before a fire,
among the ruins of an old public house, like Marius meditating among
the ruins of Carthage. There was a crumbling chimney built of bricks
not worth carting away--the early bricks in South Gippsland were
very bad, and the mortar had no visible lime in it--the ground was
strewn with brick-bats, bottles, sardine tins, hoop iron, and other
articles, the usual refuse of a bush shanty. It had been, in the
early times, a place reeking with crime and debauchery. Men had gone
out of it mad with drinking the poisonous liquor, had stumbled down
the steep bank, and had ended their lives and crimes in the black
Tarra river below. Here the rising generation had taken their first
lessons in vice from the old hands who made the house their favourite
resort. Here was planned the murder of Jimmy the Snob by Prettyboy
and his mates, whose hut was near the end of the bridge across the
river, and for which