“Lucky be blowed.  I wish I’d never seen this blasted place.  Here have I been sinking holes and puddling for five months, and hav’n’t made enough to pay my tucker and the Government license, thirty bob a month.  I am a mason, and I threw up twenty-eight bob a day to come to this miserable hole.  Wherever you come from, young man, I advise you to go back there again.  There’s twenty thousand men on Bendigo, and I don’t believe nineteen thousand of ’em are earning their grub.”

“I can’t well go back fifteen thousand miles, even if I had money to take me back,” answered Philip.

“Well, you might walk as far as Melbourne,” said the hairy man, “and then you could get fourteen bob a day as a hodman; or you might take a job at stone breaking; the Government are giving 7s. 6d. a yard for road metal.  Ain’t you got any trade to work at?”

“No, I never learned a trade, I am only a gentleman.”  He felt mean enough to cry.

“Well, that’s bad.  If you are a scholar, you might keep school, but I don’t believe there’s half-a-dozen kids on the diggin’s.  They’d be of no mortal use except to tumble down shafts.  Fact is, if you are really hard up, you can be a peeler.  Up at the camp they’ll take on any useless loafer wot’s able to carry a carbine, and they’ll give you tucker, and you can keep your shirt clean.  But, mind, if you do join the Joeys, I hope you’ll be shot.  I’d shoot the hull blessed lot of ’em if I had my way.  They are nothin’ but a pack of robbers.”  The hairy man knew something of current history and statistics, but he had not a pleasant way of imparting his knowledge.

Picaninny Gully ended in a flat, thinly timbered, where there were only a few diggers.  Turning to the left, Philip found two men near a waterhole hard at work puddling.  When he bade them good-day, they did not swear at him, which was some comfort.  They were brothers, and were willing to talk, but they did not stop work for a minute.  They had a large pile of dirt, and were making hay while the sun shone—­that is, washing their dirt as fast as they could while the water lasted.  During the preceding summer they had carted their wash-dirt from the gully until rain came and filled the waterhole.  They said they had not found any rich ground, but they could now make at least a pound a day each by constant work.  Philip thought they were making more, as they seemed inclined to sing small; in those days to brag of your good luck might be the death of you.

While Philip was away interviewing the diggers, Jack showed me where he had worked his first claim, and had made 400 pounds in a few days.  “You might mark off a claim here and try it,” he said.  “I think I took out the best gold, but there may be a little left still hereabout.”  I pegged off two claims, one for Philip, and one for myself, and stuck a pick in the centre of each.  Then we sat down on a log.  Six men came up the gully carrying their swags, one of them was unusually tall.  Jack said:  “Do you see that big fellow there?  His name is McKean.  He comes from my part of Ireland.  He is a lawyer; the last time I saw him he was in a court defending a prisoner, and now the whole six feet seven of him is nothing but a dirty digger.”