, think it would be
nice to go and buy something "pour passer le temps." He therefore
grumbles slightly at having no rest like other people.

"That's all very fine," says Mr Jack Bowles, who, seated on a case, is
smoking a large meerschaum and mildly regarding all things, "but what
have you got to do when we're all HARD AT WORK at the shed?" He speaks
with an air of great importance and responsibility.

"That's right, Mr Bowles," chimes in one of the shearers, "stand up for
the shed. I never see a young gentleman work as hard as you do."

"Bosh!" growls de Vere, "as if anybody couldn't gallop about from the
shed to the washpen, and carry messages, and give half of them wrong!
Why, Mr Gordon said the other day, he should have to take you off and
put on a Chinaman--that he couldn't make more mistakes."

"All envy and malice, and t'other thing, de Vere, because you think I'm
rising in the profession," returns the good-natured Bowles, "Mr
Gordon's going to send 20,000 sheep, after shearing, to the Lik Lak
paddock, and he said I should go in charge."

"Charge be hanged!" laughs de Vere, with two very bright-patterned
Crimean shirts, one in each hand, which he offers to a tall young
shearer for inspection. "There's a well there, and whenever
either of the two men, of whom you'll have CHARGE, gets sick or runs
away, you'll have to work the whim in his place, till another man's
sent out, if it's a month."

This appalling view of station promotion rather startles Mr Jack, who
applies himself to his meerschaum, amid the ironical comments of the
shearers. However, not easily daunted or "shut up," according to the
more familiar station phrase, he rejoins, after a brief interval of
contemplation, "that accidents will happen, you know, de Vere, my
boy--apropos of which moral sentiment, I'll come and help you in your
dry-goods business; and then, look here, if YOU get ill or run away,
I'll have a profession to fall back upon."

This is held to be a Roland of sufficient pungency for de Vere's
Oliver. Everyone laughed. And then the two youngsters betook themselves
to a humorous puffing of the miscellaneous contents of the store:
tulip-beds of gorgeous Crimean shirts, boots, books, tobacco, canvas
slippers, pocket-knives, Epsom salts, pipes, pickles, painkillers,
pocket handkerchiefs, pills, sardines, saddles, shears and sauces: in
fact everything which every kind of man might want, and which
apparently every man did want, for la