swinging from side to side under the lash of the bullocky, who yelled hoarse profanity with the volubility of an auctioneer and the vocabulary of a Yankee skipper unchecked by authority.  A little further on another team, drawn up before a hotel, lay sprawling, half buried, the patient bullocks twisted into painful angles by reason of their yokes, quietly chewing the cud.  Riders and drivers conformed to no rule of the road, and maintained a headlong pace implying a great contempt for horseflesh, and no more respect for their own limbs than for the neck of the merest stranger.  From the bars, which were frequent, came a babel of laughter and shouting.  To the ‘Pea-souper’ every thing was new and wonderful.

A squalid aboriginal swathed in an old tablecloth fresh from some breakfast started from a corner, pointing a long, dirty finger at Done, and grinning a wide grin.

‘Yah! dam new chum!’ he said.  Then he laughed as only an Australian black can, with a glitter of seemingly endless white teeth, and a strident roar that might have been heard a mile off.

‘New chum!’ This appellation had been thrown at Done a dozen times.

‘Pea-souper!’ trumpeted a horseman through his hands.  There were sarcastic references to ‘limejuice,’ and Jim was asked by several strangers, with a show of much concern, if his mother knew he was out.  ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’ was then a new and popular street gag, and the query implied a childlike incapability of taking care of himself on the part of the person addressed, and was generally accepted as a choice piece of humour.  Jim heard so many references to the ’new chum’s bundle’ that he was presently satisfied he owed all these unpleasant little attentions to the burden he carried, and he determined to rid himself of it at the first opportunity.  Turning into Bourke Street, he eventually found a hotel where there was comparative peace.  Entering, he called for a drink.

‘New chum?’ queried the barman, after serving him.

‘I suppose I am,’ replied Jim.  ’Look here, would you mind telling me what in the devil’s name a new chum is?’

‘A new chum is a man fresh from home.’

‘From England?’

’Scotland, Ireland, anywhere else, if he’s green and inexperienced.  Miners from the Californian fields don’t rank as new chums.’

‘And how am I known as a new chum?’

The barman grinned.  ‘That’ll tell on you all over the place,’ he said, indicating the bag.  ’That’s a true new chum’s bundle.  No Australian would expatriate himself by carrying his goods in that fashion.  He makes them up in a roll, straps them, and carries them in a sling on his back.  His bundle is then a swag.  The swag is the Australian’s national badge.’

’Well, I’m hanged if that isn’t a little thing to make a row about.  Do you reckon it shameful to be a new chum, then?’

’Not exactly.  No offence is intended; the men jeer out of mere harmless devilment.  The new churn’s got so much to learn here, he can’t help looking a born fool as a general thing.’