ng as
a thriving, busy centre.

Beyond the smithy were the school-house and the local constable's
cottage, a few more cottages occupied by the schoolmaster, the smith,
the saw-miller, and some unofficial residents, and, at the end of all,
the Carrier's Rest, the township hotel. The roadway through the town was
very dusty, and the dust, in the long, hot, dry seasons, lay upon the
iron roofs of the houses--tin, it was locally called--and clung to the
verandah posts and walls. A passing traveller on horseback, or in a
dray, raised clouds of it, which drifted over everything and covered
everything with a light film, but yet did not drive the inhabitants into
the Carrier's Rest, for the Birralong people were sober, as they usually
are in bush townships--sober, that is, as things are understood in the
Southern Land of sunshine and freedom. Occasionally a man would come
down the road who perhaps had not seen so much civilization for years
before; who had, perhaps for years, been away in some outlying portion
of the outlying West, boundary riding round a paddock or stock riding on
a station; or, perchance, fossicking up and down the gullies of broken
country under the mistaken idea that the specks and grains of gold he
found, and which just kept him in "tucker," would lead him some day to a
mighty reef which would make him a millionaire in a night; but who, in
all those years, had drunk nothing but tea or water, and eaten nothing
but beef and damper, living a glorious, free, untrammelled life, with
the scent of the eucalypt ever in his nostrils and the pure, clear air
of the bush ever in his lungs. And such a man, entering upon a new
world, as it were, in his return to civilization, would greet that
civilization--with a nip.

In an hour he would be "on a bender;" in three he would be "on the
bust;" in six the "town would be red;" and soon afterwards the man
himself would be stretched out across the door of the Carrier's Rest,
senseless, helpless, "blind." Any one entering or leaving the bar
stepped over him as he lay, so as not to disturb him while he was
"sleeping it off" in the cool; and possibly some looked down on him with
pity, and some with contempt, while yet others were moved to envy and
exultant admiration. But generally the township went to Marmot's rather
than to the Rest--generally.

There were occasions--such as when a Queensland horse won the Melbourne
Cup, or when a drought broke up, or produce values took a l