“I hear you have lost your mate Philip, and my mates have all gone away and taken the tent with them; so I want to ask you to let me stay in your tent until I can look round a bit.”

This young man’s name was David Beswick, but he was known simply as “Bez.”  He was a harmonious tailor from Manchester; he played the violoncello, also the violin; had a good tenor voice, and a talent for the drama.  He, and a man named Santley from Liverpool, had taken leading parts in our plays and concerts on shipboard.  Scott, the artist, admired Bez; he said he had the head, the features, and the talent of a Shakespeare.  He had a sketch of Bez in his portfolio, which he was filling with crooked trees, common diggers, and ugly blackamoors.  I could see no Shakespeare in Bez; he was nothing but a dissipated tailor who had come out in the steerage, while I had voyaged in the house on deck.  I was, therefore, a superior person, and looked down on the young man, who was seated on a log near the fire, one leg crossed over the other, and slowly stroking his Elizabethan beard.  I said: 

“Yes, Philip has left me, but I don’t want any partner.  I understand you are a tailor by trade, and I don’t think much of a tailor.”

“Well,” replied Bez, “I don’t think much of him myself, so I have dropped the business.  I am now a sailor.  You know yourself I sailed from Liverpool to Melbourne, and, anyhow, there’s only the difference of a letter between a tailor and a sailor.”

There was a flaw somewhere in the argument, but I only said, “’Valeat quantum valere potest.’” Bez looked solemn; a little Latin goes a long way with some people.  He was an object of charity, and I made him feel it.

“In the first place this tent is teetotal.  No grog is to come inside it.  There is to be no mining partnership.  You can keep all the gold you get, and I shall do the same.  You must keep all trade secrets, and never confess you are a tailor.  I could never hold up my head among the diggers if they should discover that my mate was only the ninth part of a man.  You must carry to the tent a quantity of clay and rocks sufficient to build a chimney, of which I shall be the architect.  You will also pay for your own tucker, chop wood, make the fire, fetch water, and boil the billy.”  Bez promised solemnly to abide by these conditions, and then I allowed him to deposit his swag in the tent.

The chimney was built in three days, and we could then defy the weather, and dispense with the umbrella.  Bez performed his part of the contract well.  He adopted a rolling gait and the frown of a pirate; he swore naval oaths strong enough to still a hurricane.  Among his digging outfit was a huge pick; it was a two-man pick, and he carried it on his shoulder to suggest his enormous strength.  He threw tailordom to the winds; when a rent appeared in his trousers he closed it with pins, disdaining the use of the needle, until he became so ragged that I ordered him into dock for repairs.