“Come in, Jackson!  Your tally is so-and-so.  Is that right?”

Jackson.—­“I suppose so.”

“Cook and store account, so much; shearing account so much.”

Jackson.—­“And a good deal too.”

“That is your affair,” said Mr Gordon, sternly enough.  “Now look here!  You’re in my opinion a bad shearer and a bad man.  You have given me a great deal of trouble, and I should have kicked you out of the shed weeks ago if I had not been short of men.  I shall make a difference between you and men who have tried to do their best.  I make you no allowance of any sort, I pay you by the strict agreement.  There’s your cheque.  Go!”

Jackson goes out with a very black countenance.  He mutters with a surly oath that if “he’d known how he was going to be served he’d ha’ ‘blocked’ ’em a little more.”  He is pretty well believed to have been served right, and he secures no sympathy whatever.  Working-men of all classes are shrewd and fair judges generally.  If an employer does his best to mete out justice he is always appreciated and supported by the majority.  These few instances will serve as a description of the whole process of settling with the shearers.  The horses have all been got in.  Great catching and saddling-up has taken place all the morning.  By the afternoon the whole party are dispersed to the four winds; some, like Abraham Lawson and his friends, to sheds “higher up,” in a colder climate, where shearing necessarily commences later.  From these they will pass to others, until the last sheep in the mountain runs are shorn.  Then those who have not farms of their own betake themselves to reaping.  Billy May and Jack Windsor are quite as ready to back themselves against time in the wheat-field as on the shearing-floor.  Harvest over, they find their pockets inconveniently full, so they commence to visit their friends and repay themselves for their toils by a tolerably liberal allowance of rest and recreation.

Old Ben and a few choice specimens of the olden time get no further than the nearest public house.  Their cheques are handed to the landlord and a “stupendous and terrible spree” sets in.  At the end of a week he informs them that they have received liquor to the amount of their cheques—­something over a hundred pounds—­save the mark!  They meekly acquiesce, as is their custom.  The landlord generously presents them with a glass of grog each, and they take the road for the next woolshed.

The shearers being despatched, the sheep-washers, a smaller and less regarded force, file up.  They number some forty men.  Nothing more than fair bodily strength, willingness and obedience being required in their case, they are more easy to get and to replace than shearers.  They are a varied and motley lot.  That powerful and rather handsome man is a New Yorker, of Irish parentage.  Next to him is a slight, neat, quiet individual.  He was a lieutenant in a line regiment.  The lad in the rear was a Sandhurst