‘Good luck, mate!’ ‘Good luck!’ The trees showered kindly wishes, and hearty compliments danced from lip to lip.  A spirit of irrepressible jollity laughed in the land.  Drays, waggons, buggies, cabs, vehicles of all kinds, were pressed into the service of the adventurers.  Four diggers went roaring by in a dilapidated landau that had seen vice-regal service in Hobart Town, driven by a fifth blackguard dressed in an old livery, and they brandished champagne bottles, and scattered the liquid gold like emperors—­lucky pioneers from Buninyong.  A ragged, bare-footed, hatless urchin, a stowaway fresh from the streets of London, whipped behind, as he might have done a few weeks earlier on a Bishop’s carriage in Rotten Row.  The mates next encountered a band of Chinamen carrying their burdens on bamboos, covering the ground smartly with their springing trot and cackling gaily as they went; then a ‘hatter,’ drunk as a lord rolling heavily, his hands in his pockets, his hat jauntily set on the back of his head, bellowing the latest comic song, a lonely soul; then a dray, piled high with cradles, pans, picks, shovels, swags, and a miscellaneous cargo, on the top of which perched a bulky Irishwoman, going to the diggings to make her fortune as the proprietress of the Forest Creek Laundry.  This and much more in the depths of a pathless forest, the grave solitude of which was disturbed only for the moment as each jocund company hastened on into the mysterious vastness ahead, or fell back into the dense Bush that lay behind.  That anybody could have a definite idea whither he was going in this ocean of trees, that engulfed them all like stones dropped into the sea, Done found it hard to believe.

‘You’re a curious kind of devil, Jim,’ said Mike, who had been watching Done closely during the last few minutes.

‘How’s that?’

‘You don’t talk.  Worse still, you don’t smoke.’

’No; in England I had neither mates nor friends, and smoking’s a convivial disease—­a kid catches it from his companions.’

’I might have guessed you were bred a “hatter”; you’re as dumb as a mute.’

’Same reason, Mike; but I’m getting over it.  I’m getting over a good many things rather too suddenly.  I’m sort of mentally breathless.  A year ago I’d have sworn that friendship and good-fellowship were impossible to me.’

‘Go on!’

‘And just now I’m feeling things too keenly to talk much about them.’

‘’Nough said, Jimmy; I ain’t complaining.’  Mike knocked the ashes from his pipe on his boot.  ‘I s’pose I’d best get somethin’ for breakfast,’ he said, rising and stretching himself.

‘What, here?’ Jim looked about him into the darkness.

’Here or hereabouts.  Keep an eye on the swags.  I won’t be gone more’n an hour at the outside.’

Micah Burton went off into the dense Bush, that to Jim looked grimly unpromising, and the latter lay back upon the grass again, with quite a luxurious sensation.  The hard day’s walking made this rest peculiarly agreeable:  he had eaten well, his mind was at peace—­he no longer concerned himself with psychological theories—­he was content to live and feel.