He looked up.  The sun was setting.  Beneath the dark roof of evergreens the eucalyptus boles stood out, like basalt pillars, black against a background of burning flame.  The flying foxes shot from tree to tree, and moths as big as sparrows whirred about the trunks, one moment black against the glare beyond, and vanishing the next, like imps of darkness, into their native gloom.  There was no sound of living thing around, save the ghastly rattle of the dead bark-tassels which swung from every tree, and far away, the faint clicking of the diggers at their work, like the rustle of a gigantic ant-hill.  Was there one among them all who cared for him? who would not forget him in a week with—­“Well, he was pleasant company, poor fellow,” and go on digging without a sigh?  What, if it were his fate to die, as he had seen many a stronger man, there in that lonely wilderness, and sleep for ever, unhonoured and unknown, beneath that awful forest roof, while his father looked for bread to others’ hands?

No man was less sentimental, no man less superstitious than Thomas Thurnall; but crushed and softened—­all but terrified (as who would not have been?)—­by that day’s news, he could not struggle against the weight of loneliness which fell upon him.  For the first and last time, perhaps, in his life, he felt fear; a vague, awful dread of unseen and inevitable possibilities.  Why should not calamity fall on him, wave after wave?  Was it not falling on him already?  Why should he not grow sick to-morrow, break his leg, his neck—­why not?  What guarantee had he in earth or heaven that he might not be “snuffed out silently,” as he had seen hundreds already, and die and leave no sign?  And there sprang up in him at once the intensest yearning after his father and the haunts of his boyhood, and the wildest dread that he should never see them.  Might not his father be dead ere he could return?—­if ever he did return.  That twelve thousand miles of sea looked to him a gulf impassable.  Oh, that he were safe at home! that he could start that moment!  And for one minute a helplessness, as of a lost child, came over him.

Perhaps it had been well for him had he given that feeling vent, and, confessing himself a lost child, cried out of the darkness to a Father; but the next minute he had dashed it proudly away.

“Pretty baby I am, to get frightened, at my time of life, because I find myself in a dark wood—­and the sun shining all the while as jollily as ever away there in the west!  It is morning somewhere or other now, and it will be morning here again to-morrow.  ’Good times and bad times, and all times pass over;’—­I learnt that lesson out of old Bewick’s vignettes, and it has stood me in good stead this many a year, and shall now.  Die?  Nonsense.  I take more killing than that comes to.  So for one more bout with old Dame Fortune.  If she throws me again, why, I’ll get up again, as I have any time these fifteen years.  Mark’s right.  I’ll stay here and work till I make a hit, or luck runs dry, and then home and settle; and, meanwhile, I’ll go down to Melbourne to-morrow, and send the dear old man two hundred pounds; and then back again here, and to it again.”