oys, or girls--as the case may have
been--and that we had our father's nose but our mother's eyes, or the
other way about; and say that the baby was the dead spit of its mother,
and then added, for father's benefit: "But yet he's like you, Tom." It
did seem strange to the children to hear him address the old man by his
Christian name---considering that the mother always referred to him as
"Father." She called the old mate Mr So-and-so, and father called him
Bill, or something to that effect.
Occasionally the old mate would come dressed in the latest city fashion,
and at other times in a new suit of reach-me-downs, and yet again he
would turn up in clean white moleskins, washed tweed coat, Crimean
shirt, blucher boots, soft felt hat, with a fresh-looking speckled
handkerchief round his neck. But his face was mostly round and brown
and jolly, his hands were always horny, and his beard grey. Sometimes
he might have seemed strange and uncouth to us at first, but the old
man never appeared the least surprised at anything he said or did--they
understood each other so well--and we would soon take to this relic of
our father's past, who would have fruit or lollies for us--strange that
he always remembered them--and would surreptitiously slip "shilluns"
into our dirty little hands, and tell us stories about the old days,
"when me an' yer father was on the diggin's, an' you wasn't thought of,
my boy."
Sometimes the old mate would stay over Sunday, and in the forenoon or
after dinner he and father would take a walk amongst the deserted shafts
of Sapling Gully or along Quartz Ridge, and criticize old ground, and
talk of past diggers' mistakes, and second bottoms, and feelers, and
dips, and leads--also outcrops--and absently pick up pieces of quartz
and slate, rub them on their sleeves, look at them in an abstracted
manner, and drop them again; and they would talk of some old lead they
had worked on: "Hogan's party was here on one side of us, Macintosh was
here on the other, Mac was getting good gold and so was Hogan, and now,
why the blanky blank weren't we on gold?" And the mate would always
agree that there was "gold in them ridges and gullies yet, if a man only
had the money behind him to git at it." And then perhaps the guv'nor
would show him a spot where he intended to put down a shaft some
day--the old man was always thinking of putting down a shaft. And these
two old fifty-niners would mooch round and sit on their heels o
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