“All envy and malice, and t’other thing, de Vere, because you think I’m rising in the profession,” returns the good-natured Bowles, “Mr Gordon’s going to send 20,000 sheep, after shearing, to the Lik Lak paddock, and he said I should go in charge.”

“Charge be hanged!” laughs de Vere, with two very bright-patterned Crimean shirts, one in each hand, which he offers to a tall young shearer for inspection.  “There’s a well there, and whenever either of the two men, of whom you’ll have charge, gets sick or runs away, you’ll have to work the whim in his place, till another man’s sent out, if it’s a month.”

This appalling view of station promotion rather startles Mr Jack, who applies himself to his meerschaum, amid the ironical comments of the shearers.  However, not easily daunted or “shut up,” according to the more familiar station phrase, he rejoins, after a brief interval of contemplation, “that accidents will happen, you know, de Vere, my boy—­ apropos of which moral sentiment, I’ll come and help you in your dry-goods business; and then, look here, if you get ill or run away, I’ll have a profession to fall back upon.”

This is held to be a Roland of sufficient pungency for de Vere’s Oliver.  Everyone laughed.  And then the two youngsters betook themselves to a humorous puffing of the miscellaneous contents of the store:  tulip-beds of gorgeous Crimean shirts, boots, books, tobacco, canvas slippers, pocket-knives, Epsom salts, pipes, pickles, painkillers, pocket handkerchiefs, pills, sardines, saddles, shears and sauces:  in fact everything which every kind of man might want, and which apparently every man did want, for large and various were the purchases, and great the flow of conversation.  Finally, everything was severely and accurately debited to the purchasers, and the store was cleared and locked up.  A large store is a necessity of a large station; not by any means because of the profit upon goods sold, but it obviously would be bad economy for old Bill, the shepherd, or Barney, the bullock-driver, to visit the next township, from ten to thirty miles distant, as the case may be, every time the former wanted a pound of tobacco, or the latter a pair of boots.  They might possibly obtain these necessary articles as good in quality, as cheap in price.  But there are wolves in that wood, oh, my weak brothers!  In all towns dwells one of the ’sons of the Giant’—­the Giant Grog—­red-eyed, with steel muscles and iron claws; once in these, which have held many and better men to the death, neither Barney nor Bill emerges, save pale, fevered, nerveless, and impecunious.  So arose the station store.  Barney befits himself with boots without losing his feet; Bill fills his pocket with match-boxes and smokes the pipe of sobriety, virtuous perforce till his carnival, after shearing.