at some back gate or restaurant, and then sit in the park or walk round and round, the same old hopeless round, all day. There's no prison like the city for a poor man.
Nearly every man the traveller meets in the bush is about as dirty and ragged as himself, and just about as hard up; but in the city nearly every man the poor unemployed meets is a dude, or at least, well dressed, and the unemployed feels dirty and mean and degraded by the contrast―and despised.
And he can't help feeling like a criminal. It may be imagination, but every policeman seems to regard him with suspicion, and this is terrible to a sensitive man.
We once had the key of the street for a night. We don't know how much tobacco we smoked, how many seats we sat on, or how many miles we walked before morning. But we do know that we felt like a felon, and that every policeman seemed to regard us with a suspicious eye; and at last we began to squint furtively at every trap we met, which, perhaps, made him more suspicious, till finally we felt bad enough to be run in and to get six months' hard.
Three winters ago a man, whose name doesn't matter, had a small office near Elizabeth Street, Sydney. He was an hotel broker, debt collector, commission agent, canvasser, and so on, in a small way―a very small way―but his heart was big. He had a partner. They batched in the office, and did their cooking over a gas lamp. Now, every day the man-whose-name-doesn't-matter would carefully collect the scraps of food, add a slice or two of bread and butter, wrap it all up in a
