nvas houses into order and be stowing
their goods; newcomers passed unheeded, however boisterous.

'Before tea we'll have our pegs in here, Jim,' said Mike joyfully.

They had been walking since two hours before daybreak, but elation
possessed them to the exclusion of all thought of fatigue. The sight of
the field of action set Jim's sinews twitching; he longed for the strife,
and found some difficulty in restraining himself from running with the
preceding party pell-mell on to the creek. But he had nothing of the
gold-seeker's fever in his blood; the thought of amassing a fortune had
merely occurred to him: it was the free, strong, exhilarating life that
stirred him most deeply.

Burton discovered an old acquaintance in a sooty blacksmith perspiring
copiously over an open-air forge, and the mates left their swags in his
tent and hastened to the high-walled, square tent occupied by the warden
of the field to secure their licenses. Here Jim had his first taste of
officialdom in Australia, and he did not like it. The tent was thronged
with miners eager to secure their papers; they were met with cold-blooded
intolerance by a class of officials often bred to their business in the
infamous convict system, and now incapable of putting off their tyrannous
insolence in the faces of free men. Several foot police--Vandemonians
from the convict settlements--were stationed in the tent to enforce the
mandate of Commissioner McPhee, or any understrapper who might resent the
impatience of a digger, and order him to be propelled into the open on
the toe of a regulation boot. The new hands bore the indignities
carelessly, but the experienced diggers came up to the rough counter
grimly and silently, conveying in their attitude Some suggestion of a
reckoning almost due. They under stood all the injustice and flagrant
abuse the licenses implied, the new chums did not.

'Take care o' that, Done,' said Mike, flipping his own license with his
thumb; 'they're important. I've heard em called tickets of admission to
the new republic.'

'What do they stand for, Mike?'

'One month. For one month James Done is entitled to burrow for gold in
Her Majesty's mud hereabout, an' for that time he's reckoned to have a
right to be alive. At the end of the month he trots up to renew, and the
price is thirty bob every time.'

'But if James Done doesn't happen to have thirty bob?'

'Then his right to be alive is null and void, and if he's caught so muc