'You'll have to attend to those brutes in there,' she said to Mary Kyley.
'I've had as much as I can stand for one night.' She threw herself upon
her bed, and hid her face in the pillow.

'Has he gone, dear?' asked Mrs. Kyley, laying a big but gentle hand upon
the girl.

Aurora nodded her bead in the pillow, and after looking at her in silence
for a moment, Mary went in to attend to her customers, shaking her head
sadly as she went. When she peeped into the back tent again an hour later
Aurora still lay face downwards upon the bed.

'Are you asleep, Aurora?' whispered Mrs. Ben. 'No!' answered the girl
fiercely. 'For God's sake, don't bother me!'

Mrs. Ben went away again, sadder than before.

'Oh, the men, the men!' murmured the wise woman. 'To think of the good
women wasted on them, and the chits they're often wasted on!'

Jim Done enjoyed the tramp to Simpson's Ranges. The weather was fine, the
country was picturesque, and the company highly congenial. He liked the
Peetrees better in his present mood, and his interest in the popular
movement that was to culminate at Eureka was deepening daily. He had even
addressed a small meeting of miners on the subject of the rights of the
people, and he was no pusillanimous reformer. He declared the diggers had
reached that point at which toleration meant meanness of spirit. The
thought of civil war was appalling, but not so much so as the degradation
of a nation in which the manhood plodded meekly under the whip, like
driven cattle yoked to their load.

The men carried small swags, having entrusted their tools and tents to
teamsters, and, travelled quietly, taking four days to accomplish the
journey. The route lay through trackless country. As yet few parties from
Forest Creek had set out for Simpson's Ranges, and Jim and his friends
encountered no other travellers until they were approaching the new rush,
and then the road assumed the familiar characteristics, and the noisy,
boisterous troops went gaily by. These might have been the identical men
who tramped to Diamond Gully through the Black Forest, so much did they
resemble the former in their joyousness and their wild exuberance of word
and action, and in their manner of conveying their belongings too, and in
their frank good-fellowship. But by this time Jim was an experienced
Antipodean, and knew that in such circumstances men always behave much in
the same way, and that dignity is the first oppressive observance to