life, allowing their minds to be occupied with aspirations after political freedom.  The failure of Chartism in England had driven thousands of hot-blooded champions of popular rights to Australia, and these were the leaven that leavened the whole lump.  They talked of people’s parliaments, manhood suffrage, and payment of members in a country governed by a pack of British nominees who had no knowledge of the bulk of the people and no sympathy with their aspirations.  The ideas stirred the miners; they found a lodgment in every breast, and already men spoke of an Australian Republic south of the Murray, governed on the liberal principles enunciated by Fergus O’Connor.

Jim had supposed the tolerance of man towards man, the absence of petty prejudices, and the large appreciation of individual liberty that belonged to the character of a brave, self population to be manifestations of an absolute freedom; he found the men fired with a passionate aspiration for liberty, just as the masses in England had been five years earlier, and possessed of even more substantial reasons for revolt.  The idea of the young republic delighted him; he was already prepared to shed his blood in establishing that glorious ideal.  Stories he had heard of the indignities to which the miners were subjected by an insolent bureaucracy, of men being hunted down like dingoes and beaten with the drawn swords of the troopers because of their failure to comply with the outrageous licensing decrees, bred in him a hatred akin to that felt by the diggers who had suffered in person.

But Done’s first experience of a license-hunt was largely farcical.  Mr. Commissioner McPhee had chosen a sweltering hot day for his hunt.  Most of the diggers on Diamond Gully were below, sheltered from the mordant rays of a sun that blazed in the cloudless sky, so close to earth that its heat struck the face like a licking flame.  Jim had just brought some picks from the smithy, when he saw the troopers, headed by the magnate on a fine chestnut, descend upon the gully, their glazed cap-peaks and their swords flashing gaily in the sun.  The mounted men divided at the head of the gully, and came down on each side of the lead; the foot police followed Commissioner McPhee, head Serang and cock of the walk from Sawpit Gully to Castlemaine.  The duty of the foot police was to rouse the diggers out of their drives, and enforce the orders of the high and mighty McPhee.  On Diamond Gully the wash was so shallow that the police had no difficulty in getting the men to the surface, and the inrush of the troopers was the signal for a swarming The men poured from the crowded claims, and in a few seconds the gully was awakened to violent action, and given over to tumult.

The air resounded with the yells of the miners, raised in warning and derision.  ‘Jo!—­Jo!—­Jo!’ The cries travelled the whole length of the lead, like a salute of musketry.  Mike came up the rope, hand over hand.