permit me to take his case as an illustration? I find, Thompson, that the tariff of your wool is exactly sevenpence half-penny per ton per mile. You have eight tons on your wagon at the present time. This will give you five shillings for each mile you travel. You have travelled ten miles to-day”
“Sabbath day’s journey,” sighed Thompson.
“that is two pounds ten. Now,—all things considered—an occasional penalty of, say, one pound, appears to me by no means ruinous. It is not to be mentioned in comparison with other losses which you have been unfortunate enough to sustain, yet it appears to be your chief grievance.”
“Yes; that’s one way of looking at it,” muttered Thompson, after a pause. The other fellows were silently and futilely wrestling with the apparent anomaly. A metaphysical question keeps slipping away from the grasp of the bullock driver’s mind like a wet melon-seed.
[Yet the solution is simple. The up-country man is decidedly openhanded; he will submit to crushing losses with cheerfulness, tempered, of course, by humility in those cases where he recognises the operation of an overhanging curse; he will subscribe to any good or bad cause with a liberality excelled only by the digger; he will pay gambling debts with the easy, careless grace which makes every P. of W. so popular in English sporting circles—in a word, the smallest of his many sins is parsimony. But the penal suggestiveness of trespass-penalty touches the sullen dignity of his nature; and the vague, but well-grounded fear of a law made and administered solely by his natural enemies makes him feel about as apprehensive as John Bunyan, though certainly more dangerous. Of course, Willoughby, born and bred a member of the governing class, couldn’t easily conceive the dismay with which these outlaws regarded legal seizure for trespass—or possibly prosecution in courts dominated by squatters.]
“I knows wun respectable man with two teams wot’s seed the time he’d emp’y a double-barr’ll gun on them two fellers jis’ same’s if they was wild dogs,” remarked Price ominously. “I happen ter mind me o’ wun time this man hed ter fetch hees las’ wool right on ter Deniliquin, f’m Hay, f’r two-five hextry, ’count o’ there bein’ no river that season. An’ that man ’e war shaddered hevery day acrost Wo-Winyar, an’ hees bullicks collared hevery night with Bob or Bat; an’ them bullicks har’ly fit ter crawl with fair poverty. Dirty! W’y, Chows ain’t in it with them varmin f’r dirtiness.” Here followed a steady torrent of red vituperation, showing that Price took a strong personal interest in the respectable man with the two teams.
“To my (adj.) knowledge, they dummied land for ole M’Gregor, an’ never got a cent for it,” remarked Dixon. “Same time, I got nothin’ to say agen ’em, for they never got a slant to snavel my lot. Brothers—ain’t they?”
“No (adj.) fear,” replied Mosey. “You never seen brothers hangin’ together like them chaps. I know some drovers that’s been prayin’ for theyre (adj.) souls every night for years, on account o’ the way they used to rush travellin’ stock across M’Gregor’s runs. Whenever there was dirty
