*****

The Bushmen returned to the shanty as soon as the coach was out of
sight, and proceeded to 'knock down' the fiver.

Jimmy Grimshaw's Wooing.

The Half-way House at Tinned Dog (Out-Back in Australia) kept Daniel
Myers--licensed to retail spirituous and fermented liquors--in drink and
the horrors for upward of five years, at the end of which time he lay
hidden for weeks in a back skillion, an object which no decent man would
care to see--or hear when it gave forth sound. 'Good accommodation
for man and beast'; but few shanties save his own might, for a
consideration, have accommodated the sort of beast which the man Myers
had become towards the end of his career. But at last the eccentric Bush
doctor, 'Doc' Wild' (who perhaps could drink as much as Myers without
its having any further effect upon his temperament than to keep him
awake and cynical), pronounced the publican dead enough to be buried
legally; so the widow buried him, had the skillion cleaned out, and the
sign altered to read, 'Margaret Myers, licensed, &c.', and continued to
conduct the pub. just as she had run it for over five years, with the
joyful and blessed exception that there was no longer a human pig and
pigstye attached, and that the atmosphere was calm. Most of the regular
patrons of the Half-way House could have their horrors decently, and,
comparatively, quietly--or otherwise have them privately--in the Big
Scrub adjacent; but Myers had not been one of that sort.

Mrs Myers settled herself to enjoy life comfortably and happily, at
the fixed age of thirty-nine, for the next seven years or so. She was
a pleasant-faced dumpling, who had been baked solid in the droughts of
Out-Back without losing her good looks, and had put up with a hard life,
and Myers, all those years without losing her good humour and nature.
Probably, had her husband been the opposite kind of man, she would have
been different--haggard, bad-tempered, and altogether impossible--for
of such is woman. But then it might be taken into consideration that she
had been practically a widow during at least the last five years of her
husband's alleged life.

Mrs Myers was reckoned a good catch in the district, but it soon seemed
that she was not to be caught.

'It would be a grand thing,' one of the periodical boozers of Tinned Dog
would say to his mates, 'for one of us to have his name up on a pub.; it
would save a lot of money.'

'It wouldn't save you anythin