y dear bairn, never after that
happened. It, or worse, might have come again. It's something stronger
in them than we know; it's the very blood, I'm thinking. But she's gone
to be the angel that Dick always said she was."

Alice looked away over the starlit garden to where the plumy trees
stirred in the night wind. "No," she said, fervently, "not 'gone to be,'
nurse dear; she was an angel always. Dick was right."

KING BILLY OF BALLARAT, By Morley Roberts

King Billy was given to strolling up and down the streets of Ballarat
when that eviscerated city was merely in process of disembowelment,
before alluvial mining gave way to quartz-crushing, when the individual
had a chance, if a very vague one, of sudden and delightful fortune. The
Ballarat blacks were a scaly lot, to talk of them like ill-fed hogs, as
men were wont to do. They dwined and dwindled, as natives will before
the resources of civilisation: the bloodthirsty ones got killed out;
the rumthirsty ones died out; the wild corroboree was reduced to a
poverty-stricken imitation of its former glory. King Billy's authority
grew less with the increase of his clothes. The brass plate with his
name on it was about the last relic of his precarious power, and was
chiefly valued as a means of notifying the public generally that they
might stand drinks to a monarch if they saw fit and were not too humble.
He was not haughty, and never presumed on his plate, as parvenus will.
He came of an ancient stock, and could afford to condescend, even if he
could not afford to pay for drinks. He was very kind to children,--white
children, of course,--and was hale-fellow-well-met with many of them.

He was particularly fond of Annie Colborn, whose father was a magistrate
and a gold commissioner, and a person of very great importance. Whether
or not King Billy was wise in his generation, and out of the unwritten
Scriptures of the somber bush had culled a maxim inculcating the wisdom
of making friends of the sons of Mammon, I cannot say, but he was always
good to Annie. For my own part, I do not believe the simple-hearted old
king had any such notion inside his thick antipodean skull. He was good
because he was not bad, which is the very best morality after all, and a
great advance on much we hear of. And, besides, he was sometimes
hungry, and Mr. Colborn's Chinese cook was very haughty, and not to
be approached except through an intermediary. And who so capable of
conciliating