ed little old madman, with black claws, dirty rags (which he never
changes), unkempt hair and beard, and a "ratty" expression. We cannot
say that we ever saw him catch a fish, or even get a bite, and we
certainly never saw him offer any for sale.

He gets a dozen or so lines out into the stream, with the shore end
fastened to pegs or roots on the bank, and passed over sticks about four
feet high, stuck in the mud; on the top of these sticks he hangs bullock
bells, or substitutes--jam tins with stones fastened inside to bits of
string. Then he sits down and waits. If the cod pulls the line the bell
rings.

The fisherman is a great authority on the river and fish, but has
usually forgotten everything else, including his name. He chops firewood
for the boats sometimes, but it isn't his profession--he's a fisherman.
He is only sane on points concerning the river, though he has all the
fisherman's eccentricities. Of course he is a liar.

When he gets his camp fixed on one bank it strikes him he ought to be
over on the other, or at a place up round the bend, so he shifts. Then
he reckons he was a fool for not stopping where he was before. He
never dies. He never gets older, or drier, or more withered looking,
or dirtier, or loonier--because he can't. We cannot imagine him as ever
having been a boy, or even a youth. We cannot even try to imagine him
as a baby. He is an animated mummy, who used to fish on the Nile three
thousand years ago, and catch nothing.

. . . . .

We forgot to mention that there are wonderfully few wrecks on the
Darling. The river boats seldom go down--their hulls are not built that
way--and if one did go down it wouldn't sink far. But, once down, a boat
is scarcely ever raised again; because, you see, the mud silts up round
it and over it, and glues it, as it were, to the bottom of the river.
Then the forty-foot alligators--which come down with the "Queenslan'
rains", we suppose--root in the mud and fill their bellies with sodden
flour and drowned deck-hands.

They tried once to blow up a wreck with dynamite because it (the
wreck) obstructed navigation; but they blew the bottom out of the river
instead, and all the water went through. The Government have been boring
for it ever since. I saw some of the bores myself--there is one at
Coonamble.

There is a yarn along the Darling about a cute Yankee who was invited
up to Bourke to report on a proposed scheme for locking the river. He
ar