They had vices of their own, and not nice ones, but they gave way to only one of the amiable little social weaknesses in which the Europeans indulged, and displayed the overpowering passion for gambling that has since become characteristic of the China-men in all their Australian camps.  They had no other amusement, and desired no leisure; they were squalid in their habits, and herded like animals; they were barren of aspirations, and their industry was brutish (though of a kind still belauded), since it left no leisure for humanizing exercises, no room for sweetness and light.  They were law-abiding, but that was not a virtue to commend itself to the Victorian diggers at this date, and they were only law-abiding because of their slavish instincts and their lack of courageous attributes.  The antipathy bred then survives in the third generation of Australians, but is less demonstrative now that laws have been enacted in accordance with the racial instinct.

The Pagans had secured a big stretch of the field close to the claim pegged out by Mike and Josh Peetree, and they were thought to have possession of the most profitable part of the alluvial deposit, but worked their claims with great caution, and were as secretive as so many mopokes, so that the whites really had no idea what their ground was like, excepting such as the experienced miners could gather from the general trend of the richer wash dirt.  Extraordinary stories of the success of the Chinese were in circulation, and provoked strenuous profanity and exceeding bitterness in the Europeans, Particularly in those whose luck was not good.  There was already talk of a white rising to drive the heathen from the field, and Done found his mates entirely in sympathy with the common sentiment; to him; also the Celestials became exceedingly repellent as he grew more familiar with their habits and manners, although he was opposed to making differences of race an excuse for wholesale robbery.

The Chinese camp was strictly apart from that of the whites, and there was no intercourse between the two parties, Levi Long being the only man who seemed attracted to the squalid huts into which the Mongolians packed themselves by some process mysterious to the Caucasian understanding.  Men in whom gambling was an absorbing passion could never be wholly objectionable to a man of his peculiar principles; but he came back from his third visit to their camp with his hands sunk to the bottoms of his pockets and a troubled look on his smooth countenance.

‘They’ve sprung a new game on me down there,’ he said to a crowd in the shanty, nodding his head back.  ’I thought I’d picked up something about it, an’ it’s cost me every bit o’ glitter I had on me to demonstrate to my entire satisfaction that I was quite wrong.  I haven’t got a scale left.  I’m feelin’ like a little boy who’s been tryin’ to teach his gran’ mother all about eggs.’

‘Fantan?’ said Burton.

‘Somethin’ o’ that character an’ complexion.  Boys, I begin to think that p’r’aps after all we’re doin’ wrong in submittin’ to the encroachments o’ the alien.’