'Well, no, I don't particularly,' he admitted.

'Then, don't be a fool. Don't gammon you do. You need not drink it. I
don't want you to. See here, Jimmy,' she continued gravely, 'Quigley
doesn't like you; he is looking for a chance to do you a mischief, and he
would have had his chance the other night if I hadn't overlooked you like
a mothering hen, and sold you good creek water at a shilling the nip.'

'I did act the fool, I admit.'

'Never a bit; but don't give Quigley his chance by numbing your good
sense with Mary Kyley's rum. Sure,' said Aurora, dropping into her honied
brogue, 'it's fer the love of me ye're comin', not for the dthrop o'
drink. Murther! would ye kill me wid denyin' it?' She was sitting on the
counter; she pressed her fingers on his lips, and laughed in his face
with happy impudence, her large handsome mouth full of pearls, her eyes
flashing a challenge. Jim's arm stole to her waist of its own initiative.

Then Mrs. Ben Kyley came roaring into the tent. 'Inveigling my girl
away!' she cried. 'Get out, you kidnapper! Where's your taste, anyhow,
philandering with a slip of a girl when there's a fine woman about with a
heart as empty as a big sieve?' And the bouncing washerwoman bore down
upon him, and bombarded him out of the place with gusts of laughter.

As yet, Done had seen little of the trials and tribulations of the
diggers. Diamond Gully was a prosperous rush, and the impositions under
which the Victorian miners complained so bitterly had not come home to
many on this field; but he had heard a great deal. The political and
social wrongs of the diggers were the staples of conversation about the
camp-fires. To Jim's great surprise, he found these men, surrounded with
the exciting conditions of their peculiar life, allowing their minds to
be occupied with aspirations after political freedom. The failure of
Chartism in England had driven thousands of hot-blooded champions of
popular rights to Australia, and these were the leaven that leavened the
whole lump. They talked of people's parliaments, manhood suffrage, and
payment of members in a country governed by a pack of British nominees
who had no knowledge of the bulk of the people and no sympathy with their
aspirations. The ideas stirred the miners; they found a lodgment in every
breast, and already men spoke of an Australian Republic south of the
Murray, governed on the liberal principles enunciated by Fergus O'Connor.

Jim had supposed the to