The preacher spoke with a German accent, but his meaning was plain.

He said: 

“My dear brethren’ ‘Beatus ille qui post aurum non abiit’.  Blessed is the man who has not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money or treasures.  You will never earn that blessing, my dear brethren.  Why are you here?  You have come from every corner of the world to look for gold.  You think it is a blessing, but when you get it, it is often a curse.  You go what you call ‘on the spree’; you find the ‘sly grog’; you get drunk and are robbed of your gold; sometimes you are murdered; or you fall into a hole and are killed, and you go to hell dead drunk.  Patrick Doyle was here at Mass last Sunday; he was then a poor digger.  Next day he found gold, ‘struck it rich,’ as you say; then he found the grog also and brought it to his tent.  Yesterday he was found dead at the bottom of his golden shaft, and he was buried in the graveyard over there near the Government camp.”

My conscience was quite easy when the sermon was finished.  It would be time enough for me to take warning from the fate of Paddy Doyle when I had made my pile.  Let the lucky diggers beware!  I was not one of them.

After we had been at work a few weeks, Father Backhaus, before stepping down from the packing-case, said: 

“I want someone to teach in a school; if there is anyone here willing to do so, I should like to see him after Mass.”

I was looking round for Philip among the crowd when he came up, eager and excited.

“I am thinking of going in to speak to the priest about that school,” he said.  “Would you have any objection?  You know we are doing no good in the gully, but I won’t leave itif you think I had better not.”

Philip was honourable; he would not dissolve our short partnership, and leave me alone unless I was quite willing to let him go.

“Have you ever kept school before?”

“No, never.  But I don’t think the teaching will give me much trouble.  There can’t be many children around here, and I can surely teach them A B C and the Catechism.”

Although I thought he had not given fortune a fair chance to bless us, he looked so wistful and anxious that I had not the heart to say no.  Philip went into the tent, spoke to the priest, and became a schoolmaster.  I was then a solitary “hatter.”

Next day a man came up the gully with a sack on his back with something in it which he had found in a shaft.  He thought the shaft had not been dug down to the bedrock, and he would bottom it.  He bottomed on a corpse.  The claim had been worked during the previous summer by two men.  One morning there was only one man on it; he said his mate had gone to Melbourne, but he had in fact killed him during the night, and dropped him down the hole.  The police never hunted out that murderer; they were too busy hunting us.

I was not long alone.  A beggarly looking young man came a few days later, and said: