ver see anything of the kind again. No; here, under bare blue
skies, out of which the sun frizzled you alive; here, where it couldn't
rain without at once being a flood; where the very winds blew
contrarily, hot from the north and bitter-chill from the south; where,
no matter how great the heat by day, the night would as likely as not
be nipping cold: here he was doomed to end his life, and to end it, for
all the yellow sunshine, more hopelessly knotted and gnarled with
rheumatism than if, dawn after dawn, he had gone out in a cutting
north-easter, or groped his way through the grey fog-mists sent up by
grey Thames.

Thus he sat and brooded, all the hatred of the unwilling exile for the
land that gives him house-room burning in his breast.

Who the man was, who now lay deep in a grave that fitted him as a glove
fits the hand, careless of the pass to which he had brought his mate;
who this really was, Long Jim knew no more than the rest. Young Bill
had never spoken out. They had chummed together on the seventy-odd-mile
tramp from Melbourne; had boiled a common billy and slept side by side
in rain-soaked blankets, under the scanty hair of a she-oak. That was
in the days of the first great stampede to the goldfields, when the
embryo seaports were as empty as though they were plague-ridden, and
every man who had the use of his legs was on the wide bush-track, bound
for the north. It was better to be two than one in this medley of
bullock-teams, lorries, carts and pack-horses, of dog-teams,
wheelbarrows and swagmen, where the air rang with oaths, shouts and
hammering hoofs, with whip-cracking and bullock-prodding; in this
hurly-burly of thieves, bushrangers and foreigners, of drunken convicts
and deserting sailors, of slit-eyed Chinese and apt-handed Lascars, of
expirees and ticket-of-leave men, of Jews, Turks and other infidels.
Long Jim, himself stunned by it all: by the pother of landing and of
finding a roof to cover him; by the ruinous price of bare necessaries;
by the length of this unheard-of walk that lay before his town-bred
feet: Long Jim had gladly accepted the young man's company on the road.
Originally, for no more than this; at heart he distrusted Young Bill,
because of his fine-gentleman airs, and intended shaking the lad off as
soon as they reached the diggings. There, a man must, for safety's
sake, be alone, when he stooped to pick up his fortune. But at first
sight of the strange, wild scene that met his e