over me; kep' me from getting robbed many a time;
fought for me; saved my life and took drunken kicks and curses for
thanks--and forgave me. He's been a true, straight, honest, and faithful
mate to me--and I ain't going to desert him now. I ain't going to kick
him out in the road with a broken leg. I--Oh, my God! my back!"

He groaned and lurched forward, but they caught him, slipped off the
swag, and laid him on a bed.

Half an hour later the shearer was comfortably fixed up.

"Where's my dog!" he asked, when he came to himself.

"Oh, the dog's all right," said the nurse, rather impatiently. "Don't
bother. The doctor's setting his leg out in the yard."

GOING BLIND

I met him in the Full-and-Plenty Dining Rooms. It was a cheap place in
the city, with good beds upstairs let at one shilling per night--"Board
and residence for respectable single men, fifteen shillings per week."
I was a respectable single man then. I boarded and resided there. I
boarded at a greasy little table in the greasy little corner under the
fluffy little staircase in the hot and greasy little dining-room or
restaurant downstairs. They called it dining-rooms, but it was only one
room, and them wasn't half enough room in it to work your elbows when
the seven little tables and forty-nine chairs were occupied. There was
not room for an ordinary-sized steward to pass up and down between the
tables; but our waiter was not an ordinary-sized man--he was a living
skeleton in miniature. We handed the soup, and the "roast beef one," and
"roast lamb one," "corn beef and cabbage one," "veal and stuffing one,"
and the "veal and pickled pork," one--or two, or three, as the case
might be--and the tea and coffee, and the various kinds of puddings--we
handed them over each other, and dodged the drops as well as we could.
The very hot and very greasy little kitchen was adjacent, and it
contained the bathroom and other conveniences, behind screens of
whitewashed boards.

I resided upstairs in a room where there were five beds and one
wash-stand; one candle-stick, with a very short bit of soft yellow
candle in it; the back of a hair-brush, with about a dozen bristles in
it; and half a comb--the big-tooth end--with nine and a half teeth at
irregular distances apart.

He was a typical bushman, not one of those tall, straight, wiry, brown
men of the West, but from the old Selection Districts, where many
drovers came from, and of the old bush school; one