and then handed it to us. 'A little of it
won't hurt you, boys,' he said, 'after a night's work.'

I took some--not much; we hadn't learned to drink then--to keep down
the fear of something hanging over us. A dreadful fear it is. It makes
a coward of every man who doesn't lead a square life, let him be as game
as he may.

Jim wouldn't touch it. 'No,' he said, when I laughed at him, 'I promised
mother last time I had more than was good for me at Dargo Races that I
wouldn't touch it again for two years; and I won't either. I can stand
what any other man can, and without the hard stuff, either.'

'Please yourself,' said father. 'When you're ready we'll have a ride
through the stock.'

We finished our meal, and a first-rate one it was. A man never has
the same appetite for his meals anywhere else that he has in the bush,
specially if he has been up half the night. It's so fresh, and the air
makes him feel as if he'd ate nothing for a week. Sitting on a log, or
in the cave, as we were, I've had the best meal I've ever tasted since
I was born. Not like the close-feeling, close-smelling, dirty-clean
graveyard they call a gaol. But it's no use beginning on that. We were
young men, and free, too. Free! By all the devils in hell, if there are
devils--and there must be to tempt a man, or how could he be so great a
fool, so blind a born idiot, as to do anything in this world that would
put his freedom in jeopardy? And what for? For folly and nonsense. For
a few pounds he could earn with a month's honest work and be all the
better man for it. For a false woman's smile that he could buy, and ten
like her, if he only kept straight and saving. For a bit of sudden pride
or vanity or passion. A short bit of what looks like pleasure, against
months and years of weariness, and cold and heat, and dull half-death,
with maybe a dog's death at the end!

I could cry like a child when I think of it now. I have cried many's
the time and often since I have been shut up here, and dashed my head
against the stones till I pretty nigh knocked all sense and feeling out
of it, not so much in repentance, though I don't say I feel sorry,
but to think what a fool, fool, fool I'd been. Yes, fool, three times
over--a hundred times--to put my liberty and life against such a
miserable stake--a stake the devil that deals the pack is so safe to win
at the end.

I may as well go on. But I can't help breaking out sometimes when I hear
the birds calling to o