about the
last of the great alluvial 'rushes' of the 'roaring days'--and dreary
and dismal enough it looked when I was there. The expression 'on' came
from being on the 'diggings' or goldfield--the workings or the goldfield
was all underneath, of course, so we lived (or starved) ON them--not in
nor at 'em.

Mary and I had been married about two years when Jim came----His name
wasn't 'Jim', by the way, it was 'John Henry', after an uncle godfather;
but we called him Jim from the first--(and before it)--because Jim was a
popular Bush name, and most of my old mates were Jims. The Bush is full
of good-hearted scamps called Jim.

We lived in an old weather-board shanty that had been a sly-grog-shop,
and the Lord knows what else! in the palmy days of Gulgong; and I did
a bit of digging ('fossicking', rather), a bit of shearing, a bit of
fencing, a bit of Bush-carpentering, tank-sinking,--anything, just to
keep the billy boiling.

We had a lot of trouble with Jim with his teeth. He was bad with every
one of them, and we had most of them lanced--couldn't pull him through
without. I remember we got one lanced and the gum healed over before
the tooth came through, and we had to get it cut again. He was a plucky
little chap, and after the first time he never whimpered when the doctor
was lancing his gum: he used to say 'tar' afterwards, and want to bring
the lance home with him.

The first turn we got with Jim was the worst. I had had the wife and Jim
out camping with me in a tent at a dam I was making at Cattle Creek; I
had two men working for me, and a boy to drive one of the tip-drays,
and I took Mary out to cook for us. And it was lucky for us that the
contract was finished and we got back to Gulgong, and within reach of
a doctor, the day we did. We were just camping in the house, with our
goods and chattels anyhow, for the night; and we were hardly back home
an hour when Jim took convulsions for the first time.

Did you ever see a child in convulsions? You wouldn't want to see it
again: it plays the devil with a man's nerves. I'd got the beds fixed up
on the floor, and the billies on the fire--I was going to make some tea,
and put a piece of corned beef on to boil over night--when Jim
(he'd been queer all day, and his mother was trying to hush him to
sleep)--Jim, he screamed out twice. He'd been crying a good deal, and
I was dog-tired and worried (over some money a man owed me) or I'd have
noticed at once that there was