good-nature,
'softness', or weakness--call it which you like--developed as I wrote
on.

I know Joe Wilson very well. He has been through deep trouble since the
day he brought the double buggy to Lahey's Creek. I met him in Sydney
the other day. Tall and straight yet--rather straighter than he had
been--dressed in a comfortable, serviceable sac suit of 'saddle-tweed',
and wearing a new sugar-loaf, cabbage-tree hat, he looked over the
hurrying street people calmly as though they were sheep of which he was
not in charge, and which were not likely to get 'boxed' with his. Not
the worst way in which to regard the world.

He talked deliberately and quietly in all that roar and rush. He is a
young man yet, comparatively speaking, but it would take little Mary a
long while now to pick the grey hairs out of his head, and the process
would leave him pretty bald.

In two or three short sketches in another book I hope to complete the
story of his life.

Part II.

The Golden Graveyard.

Mother Middleton was an awful woman, an 'old hand' (transported convict)
some said. The prefix 'mother' in Australia mostly means 'old hag',
and is applied in that sense. In early boyhood we understood, from
old diggers, that Mother Middleton--in common with most other 'old
hands'--had been sent out for 'knocking a donkey off a hen-roost.' We
had never seen a donkey. She drank like a fish and swore like a trooper
when the spirit moved her; she went on periodical sprees, and swore on
most occasions. There was a fearsome yarn, which impressed us greatly
as boys, to the effect that once, in her best (or worst) days, she had
pulled a mounted policeman off his horse, and half-killed him with a
heavy pick-handle, which she used for poking down clothes in her boiler.
She said that he had insulted her.

She could still knock down a tree and cut a load of firewood with any
Bushman; she was square and muscular, with arms like a navvy's; she had
often worked shifts, below and on top, with her husband, when he'd be
putting down a prospecting shaft without a mate, as he often had to
do--because of her mainly. Old diggers said that it was lovely to see
how she'd spin up a heavy green-hide bucket full of clay and 'tailings',
and land and empty it with a twist of her wrist. Most men were afraid of
her, and few diggers' wives were strong-minded enough to seek a second
row with Mother Middleton. Her voice could be heard right across Golden
Gul