get his chin whiskers full
o' tar. In my native town tarring the man you disagreed with was a
favourite amusement.'

'But there is no tar here.'

'Well, no; but I guess this has become instinctive.' He passed a hand
over his fat, smooth face.

Chow-baiting was a later development. The Chinese and Mongolians came
early to Victorian rushes, and remained long. They were never
discoverers, never pioneers, but, following quickly upon the heels of the
white prospectors, they frequently succeeded in securing the richest
claims in the alluvial beds, and from the first they were hated with an
instinctive racial hatred, that became inveterate when the whites found
in Sin Fat a rival antagonistic in all his tastes and views, in most of
his virtues, and in all his pet vices, bar one. The Chows were
industrious diggers; they worked with ant-like assiduity from daylight to
dark, and often long after that were to be seen at their holes, toiling
by the light of lanterns.

They had vices of their own, and not nice ones, but they gave way to only
one of the amiable little social weaknesses in which the Europeans
indulged, and displayed the overpowering passion for gambling that has
since become characteristic of the China-men in all their Australian
camps. They had no other amusement, and desired no leisure; they were
squalid in their habits, and herded like animals; they were barren of
aspirations, and their industry was brutish (though of a kind still
belauded), since it left no leisure for humanizing exercises, no room for
sweetness and light. They were law-abiding, but that was not a virtue to
commend itself to the Victorian diggers at this date, and they were only
law-abiding because of their slavish instincts and their lack of
courageous attributes. The antipathy bred then survives in the third
generation of Australians, but is less demonstrative now that laws have
been enacted in accordance with the racial instinct.

The Pagans had secured a big stretch of the field close to the claim
pegged out by Mike and Josh Peetree, and they were thought to have
possession of the most profitable part of the alluvial deposit, but
worked their claims with great caution, and were as secretive as so many
mopokes, so that the whites really had no idea what their ground was
like, excepting such as the experienced miners could gather from the
general trend of the richer wash dirt. Extraordinary stories of the
success of the Chinese were in cir