ease go on; what else can you tell me?"

"What more do you want to hear? There is the pick of every sort of life
for you out there. Would you know what real excitement is? Then I shall
take you to a new gold rush. To begin with, you must imagine yourself
setting off for the field, with your trusty mate marching step by step
beside you, pick and shovel on your shoulders, and both resolved to make
your fortunes in the twinkling of an eye. When you get there, there's
the digger crowd, composed of every nationality. There's the warden and
his staff, the police officers, the shanty keepers, the blacks, and
dogs.

"There's the tented valley stretching away to right and left of you,
with the constant roar of sluice boxes and cradles, the creak of
windlasses, and the perpetual noise of human voices. There's the
excitement of pegging out your claim and sinking your first shaft,
wondering all the time whether it will turn up trumps or nothing.
There's the honest, manly labour from dawn to dusk. And then, when
daylight fails, and the lamps begin to sparkle over the field, songs
drift up the hillside from the drinking shanties in the valley, and you
and your mate weigh up your day's returns, and, having done so, turn
into your blankets to dream of the monster nugget you intend to find
upon the morrow. Isn't that real life for you?"

He did not answer, but there was a sparkle in his eyes which told me I
was understood.

"Then if you want other sorts of enterprise, there is Thursday Island,
where I hail from, with its extraordinary people. Let us suppose
ourselves wandering down the Front at nightfall, past the Kanaka
billiard saloons and the Chinese stores, into, say, the _Hotel of All
Nations_. Who is that handsome, dark, mysterious fellow, smoking a
cigarette and idly flirting with the pretty bar girl? _You_ don't know
him, but I do! There's indeed a history for you. You didn't notice,
perhaps, that rakish schooner that came to anchor in the bay early in
the forenoon. What lines she had! Well, that was his craft. To-morrow
she'll be gone, it is whispered, to try for pearl in prohibited Dutch
waters. Can't you imagine her slinking round the islands, watching for
the patrolling gunboat, and ready, directly she has passed, to slip into
the bay, skim it of its shell, and put to sea again. Sometimes they're
chased."

"What then?"

"Well, a clean pair of heels or trouble with the authorities, and
possibly a year in a Dutch priso