That's his other great extravagance. See, he gets about badly on
those spider-legs of his, and makes up for his misfortune when he splits
across a horse. He breeds the best, drives like a fiend, an' can ride
anythin' lapped in hide.'

A week later Done and Burton were on their way to Forest Creek diggings.
Everything worth working on Ballarat was pegged out, Mike said. Forest
Creek was the new Eldorado. Their tools and stores were four days ahead,
in the care of an experienced teamster whom Mike knew well, and whom he
could trust to pull through, despite the abominable roads and the
misfortunes that had knocked up many a well-found team and marked the
track with crippled horses and stranded wagons. For two days Jim had
carried his swag through the Australian Bush, and one night he had slept
on the brown grass, using his folded blanket for a pillow, the camp-fire
flickering palely at a distance, the wide-branching, dreamy gum-trees
spreading their limbs above him, the warmth of summer in the scented air
Already the instincts of the Bushman were developing in him. He began to
feel a friendship for the towering gums in their flaunting independence;
their proud individuality pleased him. To his mind they reflected the
spirit of the people--it must be the spirit of the land. Nowhere in their
feathery elegance did he find a law of conformity; each tree was a law
unto itself, tall and strong and slender, youthful and buoyant, opening
fond arms to the blue sky. The absence of the sap-greens of England
conveyed at first an impression of barrenness, but that wore off, and the
artistic side of his nature fed upon the soft harmonies of faded grass
and subdued green foliage nursing misty purples in its shade. The ground
was his bed and chair and table; never had he been so intimate with
Mother Earth. Here she was uncontaminated, the soil was sweet, and it
gave no hint of untold generations of dead fattening the grass upon which
he couched as in sweet hay. From the earth he drew an ardent patriotism.
He was already a more enthusiastic Australian than the loose-limbed
native with whom he fraternized.

They camped five miles beyond Miner's Rest on the second night,
preferring the comparative solitude of the Bush to the scant
accommodation and some what boisterous company at the shanty lately
established to cater for the fortune-hunters streaming to the new rushes.
Mike selected the spot and dropped his swag.

'We've tramped far enou