the
stream, and left it in a less likely place than where it was before.

Floating bottles began to be more frequent, and we knew by that same
token that we were nearing "Here's Luck!"--Bourke, we mean. And this
reminds us.

When the Brewarrina people observe a more than ordinary number of
bottles floating down the river, they guess that Walgett is on the
spree; when the Louth chaps see an unbroken procession of dead marines
for three or four days they know that Bourke's drunk. The poor,
God-abandoned "whaler" sits in his hungry camp at sunset and watches the
empty symbols of Hope go by, and feels more God-forgotten than ever--and
thirstier, if possible--and gets a great, wide, thirsty, quaking, empty
longing to be up where those bottles come from. If the townspeople knew
how much misery they caused by their thoughtlessness they would drown
their dead marines, or bury them, but on no account allow them to go
drifting down the river, and stirring up hells in the bosoms of less
fortunate fellow-creatures.

There came a man from Adelaide to Bourke once, and he collected all the
empty bottles in town, stacked them by the river, and waited for a boat.
What he wanted them for the legend sayeth not, but the people reckoned
he had a "private still", or something of that sort, somewhere down the
river, and were satisfied. What he came from Adelaide for, or whether he
really did come from there, we do not know. All the Darling bunyips are
supposed to come from Adelaide. Anyway, the man collected all the empty
bottles he could lay his hands on, and piled them on the bank, where
they made a good show. He waited for a boat to take his cargo, and,
while waiting, he got drunk. That excited no comment. He stayed drunk
for three weeks, but the townspeople saw nothing unusual in that. In
order to become an object of interest in their eyes, and in that line,
he would have had to stay drunk for a year and fight three times a
day--oftener, if possible--and lie in the road in the broiling
heat between whiles, and be walked on by camels and Afghans and
free-labourers, and be locked up every time he got sober enough to smash
a policeman, and try to hang himself naked, and be finally squashed by a
loaded wool team.

But while he drank the Darling rose, for reasons best known to itself,
and floated those bottles off. They strung out and started for the
Antarctic Ocean, with a big old wicker-worked demijohn in the lead.

For the first week