Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/300



me! who has not known and pitied them in this Australian land of ours? The workman's Paradise! yet all too well adapted for converting the gently-nurtured waif into the resigned labourer, the homeless vagrant. The gradations through which slowly, invisibly, but none the less surely, drifts to lower levels the luckless gentleman adventurer, are fraught with a melancholy interest. How sad it seems to realise that of the hundreds of well-dressed, well-educated, high-hearted youngsters, fresh from pleasant British homes, who every season land on our shores, a certain proportion will, in a few years of Colonial Experience (save the mark!), be transformed into misanthropic shepherds, ragged tramps, or reckless rouseabouts.

One always sees a few in the men's hut at shearing time, owning no higher aspirations than the ordinary station hand, living the rough life of the bush-labourer, relishing coarse tobacco and the coarser jests when the day's work is done, hardly distinguishable in dress, tone, and manner from their ruder comrades. Like them, alas! too prone to end each term's unrelieved labour by an aimless, ruinous drinking-bout.

It is not that the daily toil, the plain fare, and rude companionship would be in any sense degrading, were they used as means to an end. Did the cadet resolve to save all but the cash absolutely required for clothing and other needs, a small capital might easily be acquired, with reasonable credit in proportion, for which a profitable outlet is always to be found. And a knowledge of the rougher side of Australian life is always valuable wherever his lot might be cast.