tiful lady-girl--but we got instilled into us the idea that she was
an awful bad woman, something more terrible even than a drunken man, and
one whose presence was to be feared and fled from. There were two other
girls in the hut with her, also a pretty little girl, who called her
"Auntie", and with whom we were not allowed to play--for they were all
bad; which puzzled us as much as child-minds can be puzzled. We couldn't
make out how everybody in one house could be bad. We used to wonder why
these bad people weren't hunted away or put in gaol if they were so
bad. And another thing puzzled us. Slipping out after dark, when the bad
girls happened to be singing in their house, we'd sometimes run against
men hanging round the hut by ones and twos and threes, listening. They
seemed mysterious. They were mostly good men, and we concluded they were
listening and watching the bad women's house to see that they didn't
kill anyone, or steal and run away with any bad little boys--ourselves,
for instance--who ran out after dark; which, as we were informed, those
bad people were always on the lookout for a chance to do.

We were told in after years that old Peter McKenzie (a respectable,
married, hard-working digger) would sometimes steal up opposite the bad
door in the dark, and throw in money done up in a piece of paper, and
listen round until the bad girl had sung the "Bonnie Hills of Scotland"
two or three times. Then he'd go and get drunk, and stay drunk two or
three days at a time. And his wife caught him throwing the money in one
night, and there was a terrible row, and she left him; and people always
said it was all a mistake. But we couldn't see the mistake then.

But I can hear that girl's voice through the night, twenty years ago:

Oh! the bloomin' heath, and the pale blue bell,
In my bonnet then I wore;
And memory knows no brighter theme
Than those happy days of yore.
Scotland! Land of chief and song!
Oh, what charms to thee belong!

And I am old enough to understand why poor Peter McKenzie--who was
married to a Saxon, and a Tartar--went and got drunk when the bad girl
sang "The Bonnie Hills of Scotland."

His anxious eye might look in vain
For some loved form it knew!

. . . . .

And yet another thing puzzled us greatly at the time. Next door to the
bad girl's house there lived a very respectable family--a family of good
girls with whom we were allowed to play, an