And Termater Bill spat on the ground. "Eh, thet's so," he said, "thet's so." There was a pause. "But," began Termater Bill. "Well," said the Italian. "Tis the tarnation grin on the thing that gits me," the storekeeper burst out, "jest as if her was kinder larfin' at yer: her ain't no mug that busted doll, I'll lay to that." tista's grave beside his claim,—a crowd of idle diggers and dogs looked on. One man, an old fossicker, who was recovering from an attack of the jimjams (delirium tremens), and whose ideas were still rather hazy, expressed a desire to fight the corpse. "Git up," he said, "an' I will wrastle wi' yer; git up, yer blanked-out son o' a working bullock, an' I will fight yer for a Battista frowned. "Yer don't note." understand," he reiterated. Again Termater Bill spat on the ground. "Eh, thet's so," he said, "thet's so." A few weeks later a big bushfire swept across the hills, and the storekeeper had enough to do without troubling himself about the mine; but when a sudden change of wind sent the fire raging and tearing through the Fainting Ranges and away in the direction of Mount Hopeless, he retraced his steps over the blackened ground till he reached Battista's hut. It was empty close by the hide rope dangled from the windlass; the woods were silent except for the crashing of some half-charred tree as it toppled over and fell with a great splutter of cinders and wide swirling clouds of soft grey ashes; and stretched face downwards, near the shaft's mouth, the Italian lay dead. Termater Bill turned the body over. : 'Pegged out," he said softly, "the blanky cuss has pegged out." Then he turned to the door of the hut and stopped short. "No," he exclaimed, "I reckon I won't: I reckon I cudn't stumick thet God's cuss o' a grin jest yet." But the dead man lay still and paid no heed to him. Termater Bill said he reckoned the company wud 'low him to say a few words. The company 'lowed him. Some of the men sat down on the mullock-heaps and began to fill their pipes; others stood about; and one, a jackeroo,1 took off his hat and then rather sheepishly put it on again. Termater Bill cleared his throat and spat into the open grave. "Life," he said, was a jumpt-up quare thing: there was they who bottomed payable dirt 2 fust go off, an' thar wa' they who didn't." He was silent for a moment, and rubbed his face with his sleeve. "But," he continued, "maybe out thar," and he pointed vaguely towards a patch of sunset sky, across the Divide, they finds colour."3 He ceased speaking, and the men puffed away at their pipes in silence: at last some one suggested that it was time for the corpse to "turn in." They lowered the dead man into the grave, there was no coffin. His arms had stiffened spreadeagle fashion, and he lay sideways That afternoon they dug Bat- against the walls of the grave and 1 Jackeroo, a lately arrived colonist. 2 Bottom payable dirt, find sufficient gold to pay working expenses. 3 Find colour, find gold. looked as if he were about to turn a wheel into eternity. They shovelled back the earth rather gingerly, avoiding the dead man's face; but, after all, it had to be covered the same as the rest. When they had finished their task they strolled off towards the camp, only Termater Bill remaining behind. He went to Battista's hut and peered through the half-shut door there in the corner the little blue-and-gold image stared, smiling down inscrutable, indifferent. Long the man gazed back on it; then with sudden determination he entered the hut, and taking Bat tista's coat from a bench, covered the small figure, then lifting it in his arms, carried it out and flung it down the deep shaft. But under the gum-trees Battista lay still, silent, satisfied. The years went on, the bottom of the shaft filled with water, and the mullock slipped back into it with a heavy splash; the windlass rotted and grew green, and some one stole the bucket and hide rope; far, far below in the valley the sweetscented wattle burst into tufted yellow balls, and the blue mists lay on Omeo. ZACK. I TAKE to witness this westering light to which I look that all the grumbling I have ever been guilty of was official and for the public good. With me as with the rest of mankind there have been griefs upon the road, disappointments, hardship as well as error, and various kinds of wounding and robbery to endure, as well as too much matter of self-reproach. Yet never as boy or man have I been a grumbler, but only as journalist, and in performance of the natural duties of journalism. Even this I can say, that no one has ever heard me grumble at being so much a journalist, after determining to be in that line of life for only a little while and as a makeshift, the determination of so many young men whose real vocation is poesy and the writing of incomparable essays. And perhaps it would be ungrateful to repine at a perversion which carried the pervert into so many pleasures and advantages, and even to a place of power at least equal to half-adozen seats in Parliament: at least. half-a-dozen, and these free of the Whip, independent of the Speaker, and subject not at all to the gentlemen of the front benches. It would be ungrateful, too, because my long spell of journalism began at about the most fortunate time in the history of what is sometimes called a "profession," though it is not that any more than it is Cabinetministering, unless when calculation chooses to make it so. It was a fortunate time-I speak of 1860 or thereabout-for almost every reason that the good journal ist should rejoice at. It was a time of emergence from small credit and a poor wage to pay that was a good enough return for the commodity supplied, and to as much consideration in the world as modest worth should look for, whenever it cares about the world at all. I do not know what intellectual or artistic employment could be called flourishing in those dull years from the thirties to the fifties, unless in the hands of a few individuals not all very great. Mechanical invention and appliance, of course; but not painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor literature, nor the stage, and certainly not journalism-which, with one or two exceptions, as in Printinghouse Square, seems rather to have fallen back from an already poor estate. I know of a London morning paper-rich enough in these days, and no doubt as liberal as wealthy-which even toward the end of that period filled its pages with leading articles, reviews, and other high critical matter, at the rate of ten shillings per yard-long column; and I also know of a great writer, already proved and popular, who jumped at a scale of pay which could not be offered now to scribes with half his reputation: there are none with half his charm, and few with all his fitness. Moreover, till those times journalism was hardly allowed to be respectable, even with writers like Coleridge and Hazlitt to ennoble its practice; and if in the third or fourth decades of the century it was less looked down upon, it was a poorer trade than ever, I fancy, for any but a few writers in one or two newspapers alone. A business so ill paid, so ill thought of, and so limited in opportunity, was little likely to Bohemianism was its reproach, fields of observation which no satirist less stout than Swift can hope to traverse, pen in hand, with comfort and composure; and, feeling this, the Muse of Titmarsh allowed a tormentingly inviting theme to repose at the bottom of his inkpot. True, Bludyer was fished up, but not as a contemporary specimen. To avoid unpleasantness, Thackeray explained that Bludyer was no actual denizen of Fleet Street, but belonged to an anterior period. He was to be regarded as representing a lingering "monster of the ooze"; though, truth to tell, his race was not yet quite extinct. I myself knew a very perfect Bludyer years after 'Pendennis came out, his end so miserable, from the fairest be ginning, that one should be a Psalmist to describe it. Yet the Thackeray picture is a true one so far as it goes, and true as showing that in the novelist's earlier day the George Warringtons and young Pendennises were shouldering with the Shandons and Finucanes, who were soon to know their place no more. Yet were I to talk of Bohemia, it would not be in the respectable and running-down vein. I'd rather choose to make the best of it. I would say that the manners and customs of that land were not all that they were understood to be in the neighbouring country of Clapham; where the place to which men most resort for sober reflection (the club smoking-room) is still mistaken for a haunt of impropriety. I would wedge in the remark that the Bohemia of Britain was always as unlike the Bohemia of some other nations as an English school is different from a French lycée. Where it needs excuse, I would urge that manners and customs in our Bohemia were survivals from a tavern-and-coffeehouse time not very remote when no one blamed them or shrunk from them. For hundreds of years the whole nation was more social and less formal than it afterwards became, and in Bohemia old ways which the pious Dr Johnson took pleasure in survived longer than anywhere else. Further to make the best of it, I should add that the free-and-easy smokingconcerts that are coming into vogue are an acknowledgment that there was more in this pleasure which the good Doctor took with his Goldsmiths, and Reynoldses, and elegant Bennet Langtons, than should be quite abandoned; and that it is a pleasure which our fine new clubs fail to supply on account of the frost there. I should even speak of some observations of my own in Bohemia-though rather touch-and-go, and taken, perhaps, in a less lively time, foreboding the submergence that was soon to come. And in answer to the question whether the hours were not very late, I should say they were; and if there was not too much drinking, I should reply that there was. Yet not for everybody, and not but what much of it seemed to exhale at once in the breezy laughter and the battling talk of a Bohemian night's entertainment. For that it was appointed; and by that a bowl of punch or two was (I almost think we might say) justified. As the rough and tumble of football is good for the muscles and the temper, so the rough and tumble of such encountering talk was good for the wits and the temper: so I thought then, and I am not otherwise persuaded now. A dangerous country to tarry in, this Bohemia, however, and one that no careful man would have ventured the speculation of taking a lad into. But, as I knew it, it was not a land of sojourn. They who were drawn thither made the tour, came forth, threw off the loose cap of travel, donned the smooth and shining tile of civilisation, and thenceforth roamed no more. Young men who afterwards became palaced artists, or high scribes and scholars, or grave judges and counsellors of the Queen, resorted there awhile for nothing more than a jovial clamour of wit and clash of word-a laughing jail-delivery of thoughts and sentiments which otherwise might never have got release. However, Bohemia is now where Atlantis is, and there let it lie. The precursor of the newspaperwriter was the pamphleteer: and he too was held in small esteem |