se we'd had coming along.

'Richard Marston, I charge you with unlawfully taking, stealing, and
carrying away, in company with others, one thousand head of mixed
cattle, more or less the property of one Walter Hood, of Outer Back,
Momberah, in or about the month of June last.'

'All right; why don't you make it a few more while you're about it?'

'That'll do,' he said, nodding his head, 'you decline to say anything.
Well, I can't exactly wish you a merry Christmas--fancy this being
Christmas Eve, by Jove!--but you'll be cool enough this deuced hot
weather till the sessions in February, which is more than some of us
can say. Good-night.' He went out and locked the door. I sat down on
my blanket on the floor and hid my head in my hands. I wonder it didn't
burst with what I felt then. Strange that I shouldn't have felt half as
bad when the judge, the other day, sentenced me to be a dead man in a
couple of months. But I was young then.

. . . . .

Christmas Day! Christmas Day! So this is how I was to spend it after
all, I thought, as I woke up at dawn, and saw the gray light just
beginning to get through the bars of the window of the cell.

Here was I locked up, caged, ironed, disgraced, a felon and an outcast
for the rest of my life. Jim, flying for his life, hiding from every
honest man, every policeman in the country looking after him, and
authorised to catch him or shoot him down like a sheep-killing dog.
Father living in the Hollow, like a blackfellow in a cave, afraid to
spend the blessed Christmas with his wife and daughter, like the poorest
man in the land could do if he was only honest. Mother half dead with
grief, and Aileen ashamed to speak to the man that loved and respected
her from her childhood. Gracey Storefield not daring to think of me or
say my name, after seeing me carried off a prisoner before her eyes.
Here was a load of misery and disgrace heaped up together, to be borne
by the whole family, now and for the time to come--by the innocent
as well as the guilty. And for what? Because we had been too idle and
careless to work regularly and save our money, though well able to do
it, like honest men. Because, little by little, we had let bad dishonest
ways and flash manners grow upon us, all running up an account that had
to be paid some day.

And now the day of reckoning had come--sharp and sudden with a
vengeance! Well, what call had we to look for anything else? We had been
working fo