inand and the police had been decoyed away previously nearly
100 miles by false intelligence as to Moran and his gang. Our town and
treasure were thus left undefended for forty-eight hours, while a daring
criminal and his associates mingled unsuspected with all classes. We
have always regarded the present system--facetiously called police
protection--as a farce. This latter fiasco will probably confirm the
idea with the public at large. We, unlike a contemporary, have no morbid
sympathy with crime--embroidered or otherwise; our wishes, as loyal
subjects, are confined to a short shrift and a high gallows for all who
dare to obstruct the Queen's highway.'

'That's easy to understand, barrin' a word here and there,' says father,
taking his pipe out of his mouth and laying it down; 'that's the way
they used to talk to us in the old days. Dashed if I don't think it's
the best way after all. You know where you are. The rest's flummery. All
on us as takes to the cross does it with our eyes open, and deserves all
we gets.'

'I'm afraid you're right, governor; but why didn't these moral ideas
occur to you, for instance, and others earlier in life?'

'Why?' says father, getting up and glaring with his eyes, 'because I
was a blind, ignorant dog when I was young, as had never been taught
nothing, and knowed nothing, not so much as him there' (pointing to
Crib), 'for he knows what his business is, and I didn't. I was thrashed
and starved, locked up in a gaol, chained and flogged after that, and
half the time for doing what I didn't know was wrong, and couldn't know
more than one of them four-year-old colts out there that knocks his head
agin the yard when he's roped, and falls backards and breaks his neck if
he ain't watched. Whose business was it to have learned me better? That
I can't rightly say, but it seemed it was the business of the Government
people to gaol me, and iron me, and flog me. Was that justice? Any man's
sense 'll tell him it wasn't. It's been them and me for it since I got
my liberty, and if I had had a dozen lives they'd all have gone the same
road!'

We none of us felt in the humour to say much after that. Father had got
into one of his tantrums, and when he did he was fit to be tied; only
I'd not have took the contract for something. Whatever it was that had
happened to him in the old times when he was a Government man he didn't
talk about. Only every now and then he'd let out just as he did now, as
if no