The rains abated, and the temporary labour was discharged; not Norris, to whom the engineer clung as to found money; not Norris, who found himself a ganger on the line in the regular staff of navvies.  His camp was pitched in a grey wilderness of rock and forest, far from any house; as he sat with his mates about the evening fire, the trains passing on the track were their next and indeed their only neighbours, except the wild things of the wood.  Lovely weather, light and monotonous employment, long hours of somnolent camp-fire talk, long sleepless nights, when he reviewed his foolish and fruitless career as he rose and walked in the moonlit forest, an occasional paper of which he would read all, the advertisements with as much relish as the text:  such was the tenor of an existence which soon began to weary and harass him.  He lacked and regretted the fatigue, the furious hurry, the suspense, the fires, the midnight coffee, the rude and mud-bespattered poetry of the first toilful weeks.  In the quietness of his new surroundings, a voice summoned him from this exorbital part of life, and about the middle of October he threw up his situation and bade farewell to the camp of tents and the shoulder of Bald Mountain.

Clad in his rough clothes, with a bundle on his shoulder and his accumulated wages in his pocket, he entered Sydney for the second time, and walked with pleasure and some bewilderment in the cheerful streets, like a man landed from a voyage.  The sight of the people led him on.  He forgot his necessary errands, he forgot to eat.  He wandered in moving multitudes like a stick upon a river.  Last he came to the Domain and strolled there, and remembered his shame and sufferings, and looked with poignant curiosity at his successors.  Hemstead, not much shabbier and no less cheerful than before, he recognised and addressed like an old family friend.

“That was a good turn you did me,” said he.  “That railway was the making of me.  I hope you’ve had luck yourself.”

“My word, no!” replied the little man.  “I just sit here and read the Dead Bird.  It’s the depression in tryde, you see.  There’s no positions goin’ that a man like me would care to look at.”  And he showed Norris his certificates and written characters, one from a grocer in Wooloomooloo, one from an ironmonger, and a third from a billiard saloon.  “Yes,” he said, “I tried bein’ a billiard marker.  It’s no account; these lyte hours are no use for a man’s health.  I won’t be no man’s slyve,” he added firmly.

On the principle that he who is too proud to be a slave is usually not too modest to become a pensioner, Carthew gave him half a sovereign, and departed, being suddenly struck with hunger, in the direction of the Paris House.  When he came to that quarter of the city, the barristers were trotting in the streets in wig and gown, and he stood to observe them with his bundle on his shoulder, and his mind full of curious recollections of the past.