n half-a-dozen little red ones put together;
and there's the cheerful easy-going Irishman. Now the Flour was a
combination of all three and several other sorts. He was known from the
first amongst the boys at Th' Canary as the Flour o' Wheat, but no one
knew exactly why. Some said that the right name was the F-l-o-w-e-r, not
F-l-o-u-r, and that he was called that because there was no flower on
wheat. The name might have been a compliment paid to the man's character
by some one who understood and appreciated it--or appreciated it without
understanding it. Or it might have come of some chance saying of the
Flour himself, or his mates--or an accident with bags of flour. He might
have worked in a mill. But we've had enough of that. It's the man--not
the name. He was just a big, dark, blue-eyed Irish digger. He worked
hard, drank hard, fought hard--and didn't swear. No man had ever heard
him swear (except once); all things were 'lovely' with him. He was
always lucky. He got gold and threw it away.

'The Flour was sent out to Australia (by his friends) in connection with
some trouble in Ireland in eighteen-something. The date doesn't matter:
there was mostly trouble in Ireland in those days; and nobody, that
knew the man, could have the slightest doubt that he helped the
trouble--provided he was there at the time. I heard all this from a man
who knew him in Australia. The relatives that he was sent out to were
soon very anxious to see the end of him. He was as wild as they made
them in Ireland. When he had a few drinks, he'd walk restlessly to and
fro outside the shanty, swinging his right arm across in front of him
with elbow bent and hand closed, as if he had a head in chancery, and
muttering, as though in explanation to himself--

'"Oi must be walkin' or foightin'!--Oi must be walkin' or foightin'!--Oi
must be walkin' or foightin'!"

'They say that he wanted to eat his Australian relatives before he was
done; and the story goes that one night, while he was on the spree, they
put their belongings into a cart and took to the Bush.

'There's no floury record for several years; then the Flour turned up on
the west coast of New Zealand and was never very far from a pub. kept
by a cousin (that he had tracked, unearthed, or discovered somehow) at a
place called "Th' Canary". I remember the first time I saw the Flour.

'I was on a bit of a spree myself, at Th' Canary, and one evening I was
standing outside Brady's (the Flour's