r subdued sort of quietness that has force in it--as if they fully
realized that their intelligence is much higher than the average, that
they have suffered more real trouble and heartbreak than the majority of
their mates, and that their mates couldn't possibly understand them if
they spoke as they felt and couldn't see things as they do--yet men
who understand and are intensely sympathetic in their loneliness and
sensitive reserve.

I had worked in a shed with Jack Moonlight, and had met him in
Sydney, and to be mates with a bushman for a few weeks is to know him
well--anyway, I found it so. He had taken a trip to Sydney the Christmas
before last, and when he came back there was something wanting. He
became more silent, he drank more, and sometimes alone, and took to
smoking heavily. He dropped his mates, took little or no interest in
Union matters, and travelled alone, and at night.

The Australian bushman is born with a mate who sticks to him through
life--like a mole. They may be hundreds of miles apart sometimes, and
separated for years, yet they are mates for life. A bushman may have
many mates in his roving, but there is always one his mate, "my mate;"
and it is common to hear a bushman, who is, in every way, a true mate
to the man he happens to be travelling with, speak of _his mate's
mate_--"Jack's mate"--who might be in Klondyke or South Africa. A
bushman has always a mate to comfort him and argue with him, and work
and tramp and drink with him, and lend him quids when he's hard up, and
call him a b---- fool, and fight him sometimes; to abuse him to his face
and defend his name behind his back; to bear false witness and perjure
his soul for his sake; to lie to the girl for him if he's single, and to
his wife if he's married; to secure a "pen" for him at a shed where
he isn't on the spot, or, if the mate is away in New Zealand or South
Africa, to write and tell him if it's any good coming over this way. And
each would take the word of the other against all the world, and each
believes that the other is the straightest chap that ever lived-"a white
man!" And next best to your old mate is the man you're tramping, riding,
working, or drinking with.

About the first thing the cook asks you when you come along to a
shearers' hut is, "Where's your mate?" I travelled alone for a while
one time, and it seemed to me sometimes, by the tone of the inquiry
concerning the whereabouts of my mate, that the bush had an idea