and are thanked accordingly by your
mate when, with his feet in his cold, clammy boots, he discovers that his
watch reads 2 a.m. Sometimes you have the satisfaction of growling at him,
and occasionally, if you feel in very nasty humour, you may lie "dog-oh"
and watch his early rising, knowing full well the right time; laughter,
however, gives you away, and you are justly rewarded by having the
blankets torn off you. Such simple pranks as these make bearable a life
that would otherwise suffocate you with its monotony.

And yet there is a charm about the bush--the perfect peace in the "free
air of God"--that so takes hold of some men that they can never be happy
anywhere else. Civilisation is a fine thing in its way, but the petty
worries and annoyances, the bustle and excitement, the crowds of people,
the "you can't do this," and "you must do that," the necessity for
dressing in most uncomfortable garments to be like other people, and a
thousand other such matters, so distress a bushman, who, like a caged
beast in a menagerie, wanders from corner to corner and cannot find where
to rest, that he longs for the day that he will again be on the track,
with all his worldly goods with him and the wide world before him. Such
a man in the bush and in the town is as different as a fish in and out of
water.

Some of the finest fellows "outside the tracks" are the least respectable
in civilised places, where before long they can find no better occupation
than drinking, which, owing to months of teetotalism in the bush, they are
less able to stand than the ordinary individual who takes his beer or
spirits daily. And thus it is that bushmen very often get the name of
being loafers and drunkards, though on the aggregate they consume far less
liquor than our most respected citizens in the towns. The sudden change in
surroundings, good food, and the number of fellow-creatures, the noise of
traffic, and want of exercise--all these combined are apt to affect a
man's head, even when unaided by the constant flow of liquor with which a
popular bushman is deluged--a deluge hard to resist in a country where to
refuse a drink amounts to an insult. A plan recommended by some is to
"please 'em all by one jolly good spree, and then knock off and drink with
nobody." A man only gives offence who discriminates in his entertainers.

I fear I have wandered far from the subject of our journey, for Luck and I
had some time yet before us until the joys