s on the counter
and called for the most expensive frocks, the latest and best in sailor
suits, and the brightest ribbons; and things came long distances
by bullock dray and were expensive in those days. Impressionable
diggers--and most of them were--who threw nuggets to singers, and who,
sometimes, slipped a parcel into the hands of a little boy or girl, with
instructions to give it to an elder sister (or young mother, perhaps)
whom the digger had never spoken to, only worshipped from afar off. And
the elder sister or young mother, opening the parcel, would find a piece
of jewellery or a costly article of dress, and wonder who sent it.

Ah, the wild generosity of luck-intoxicated diggers of those days! and
the reckless generosity of the drinkers. "We thought it was going to
last for ever!"

"If I don't spend it on the bairns I'll spend it on the drink," Sandy
Burns used to say. "I ha' nane o' me own, an' the lass who was to gi' me
bairns, she couldn't wait."

Sandy had kept steady and travelled from one end of the world to the
other, and roughed it and toiled for five years, and the very day he
bottomed his golden hole on the Brown Snake Lead at Happy Valley he got
a letter from his girl in Scotland to say she had grown tired of waiting
and was married. Then he drank, and drink and luck went together.

Gulgong on New Year's Eve! Rows and rows of lighted tents and
camp-fires, with a clear glow over it all. Bonfires on the hills and
diggers romping round them like big boys. Tin kettling--gold dishes
and spoons, and fiddles, and hammers on pointing anvils, and sticks
and empty kerosene-tins (they made a row); concertinas and cornets,
shot-guns, pistols and crackers, all sorts of instruments, and "Auld
Lang Syne" in one mighty chorus. And now--a wretched little pastoral
town; a collection of glaring corrugated-iron hip-roofs, and maybe a
rotting propped-up bark or weather-board humpy or two--relics of the
roaring days; a dried-up storekeeper and some withered hags; a waste
of caved-in holes with rain-washed mullock heaps and quartz and gravel
glaring in the sun; thistles and burrs where old bars were; drought,
dryness, desolation and goats.

Lonely graves in the bush and grey old diggers here and there, anywhere
in the world, doing anything for a living, lonely yet because of the
girls who couldn't wait, but prospecting and fossicking here and there,
and dreaming still.

They thought it was going to last for ever.