hought I might as well start and be a blackfellow at once, so we
got a rusty pan without a handle, and cooked about a pint of fat yellow
oak-grubs; and I was about to fall to when we were discovered, and the
full weight of combined family influence was brought to bear on the
situation. We had broken a new pair of shears digging out those grubs
from under the bark of the she-oaks, and had each taken a blade as his
own especial property, which we thought was the best thing to do under
the circumstances. Uncle wanted those shears badly, so he received us
with the buggy whip--and he didn't draw the colour line either. All
that night and next day I wished he had. I was sent home, and Joe went
droving with uncle soon after that, else I might have lived a life of
freedom and content and died out peacefully with the last of my adopted
tribe.

Joe died of consumption on the track. When he was dying uncle asked: "Is
there anything you would like?"

And Joe said: "I'd like a lilly drap o' rum, boss."

Which were his last words, for he drank the rum and died peacefully.

I was the first to hear the news at home, and, being still a youngster,
I ran to the house, crying "Oh, mother! aunt's Joe is dead!"

There were visitors at our place at the time, and, as the eldest child
of the maternal aunt in question had also been christened Joe--after a
grandfather of our tribe (my tribe, not Black Joe's)--the news caused
a sudden and unpleasant sensation. But cross-examination explained the
mistake, and I retired to the rear of the pig-sty, as was my custom when
things went wrong, with another cause for grief.

They Wait on the Wharf in Black

"Seems to me that honest, hard-working men seem to accumulate
the heaviest swags of trouble in this world."--Steelman.

Told by Mitchell's Mate.

We were coming back from West Australia, steerage--Mitchell, the Oracle,
and I. I had gone over saloon, with a few pounds in my pocket. Mitchell
said this was a great mistake--I should have gone over steerage with
nothing but the clothes I stood upright in, and come back saloon with a
pile. He said it was a very common mistake that men made, but, as far
as his experience went, there always seemed to be a deep-rooted popular
prejudice in favour of going away from home with a few pounds in one's
pocket and coming back stumped; at least amongst rovers and vagabonds
like ourselves--it wasn't so generally popular or admired at