yes he hastily changed
his mind. And so the two of them had stuck together; and he had never
had cause to regret it. For all his lily-white hands and finical speech
Young Bill had worked like a nigger, standing by his mate through the
latter's disasters; had worked till the ladyish hands were horny with
warts and corns, and this, though he was doubled up with dysentery in
the hot season, and racked by winter cramps. But the life had proved
too hard for him, all the same. During the previous summer he had begun
to drink--steadily, with the dogged persistence that was in him--and
since then his work had gone downhill. His sudden death had only been a
hastening-on of the inevitable. Staggering home to the tent after
nightfall he would have been sure, sooner or later, to fall into a dry
shicer and break his neck, or into a wet one and be drowned.

On the surface of the Gravel Pit his fate was already forgotten. The
rude activity of a gold-diggings in full swing had closed over the
incident, swallowed it up.

Under a sky so pure and luminous that it seemed like a thinly drawn
veil of blueness, which ought to have been transparent, stretched what,
from a short way off, resembled a desert of pale clay. No patch of
green offered rest to the eye; not a tree, hardly a stunted bush had
been left standing, either on the bottom of the vast shallow basin
itself, or on the several hillocks that dotted it and formed its sides.
Even the most prominent of these, the Black Hill, which jutted out on
the Flat like a gigantic tumulus, had been stripped of its dense
timber, feverishly disembowelled, and was now become a bald
protuberance strewn with gravel and clay. The whole scene had that
strange, repellent ugliness that goes with breaking up and throwing
into disorder what has been sanctified as final, and belongs, in
particular, to the wanton disturbing of earth's gracious, green-spread
crust. In the pre-golden era this wide valley, lying open to sun and
wind, had been a lovely grassland, ringed by a circlet of wooded hills;
beyond these, by a belt of virgin forest. A limpid river and more than
one creek had meandered across its face; water was to be found there
even in the driest summer. She-oaks and peppermint had given shade to
the flocks of the early settlers; wattles had bloomed their brief
delirious yellow passion against the grey-green foliage of the gums.
Now, all that was left of the original "pleasant resting-place" and its
pr