long.'

'It's not a bad place, though it is rather slow and wired in sometimes,'
says Jim. 'We might be sorry we ever left it yet. When does the steamer
go to Melbourne?'

'The day after to-morrow.'

'I'll be glad to be clear off; won't you?'

We went to the theatre that night, and amused ourselves pretty well next
day and till the time came for our boat to start for Melbourne. We had
altered ourselves a bit, had our hair cut and our beards trimmed by
the hairdresser. We bought fresh clothes, and what with this, and the
feeling of being in a new place and having more money in our pockets
than we'd ever dreamed about before, we looked so transmogrified when
we saw ourselves in the glass that we hardly knew ourselves. We had
to change our names, too, for the first time in our lives; and it went
harder against the grain than you'd think, for all we were a couple of
cattle-duffers, with a warrant apiece sure to be after us before the
year was out.

'It sounds ugly,' says Jim, after we had given our names as John Simmons
and Henry Smith at the hotel where we put up at till the steamer
was ready to start. 'I never thought that Jim Marston was to come
to this--to be afraid to tell a fat, greasy-looking fellow like that
innkeeper what his real name was. Seems such a pitiful mean lie, don't
it, Dick?'

'It isn't so bad as being called No. 14, No. 221, as they sing out for
the fellows in Berrima Gaol. How would you like that, Jim?'

'I'd blow my brains out first,' cried out Jim, 'or let some other fellow
do it for me. It wouldn't matter which.'

It was very pleasant, those two or three days in Adelaide, if they'd
only lasted. We used to stroll about the lighted streets till all hours,
watching the people and the shops and everything that makes a large city
different from the country. The different sorts of people, the carts
and carriages, buggies and drays, pony-carriages and spring-carts, all
jumbled up together; even the fruit and flowers and oysters and fish
under the gas-lights seemed strange and wonderful to us. We felt as if
we would have given all the world to have got mother and Aileen down to
see it all. Then Jim gave a groan.

'Only to think,' says he, 'that we might have had all this fun some day,
and bought and paid for it honest. Now it isn't paid for. It's out of
some other man's pocket. There's a curse on it; it will have to be paid
in blood or prison time before all's done. I could shoot myself for
bei