Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/306

 friends in England. If a colonist, he knows better; knows that the old man has his half-yearly or annual 'break-out'; that he can no more inhabit the same dwelling as ardent spirits without utter debasement than fly; that such will be his life, without change or amendment, until he ends it in a Benevolent Asylum, or, more probably, is found dead in his hut. Then from his papers it will be discovered that 'Old Jack' or 'Jindabyne Joe' was, once upon a time, Lieutenant Harry Willoughby Howard of the —th Fusiliers, one of the smartest subalterns in that distinguished and tolerably fast regiment. What brought him here? How fared he so ill in Australia, where blue blood always counts for something, the Radical press notwithstanding? Heigho! These and other questions may be answered some day, or they may never be. The nearest magistrate holds an inquiry, sitting on a bench outside of the lonely hut on the sandhill. The overseer counts out his flock to a fresh hand, and the ex-Fusilier, younger brother of one of the magnates of Blankshire, is carted into the head station and decently buried, with the collie dog as chief mourner, his grief being real and unaffected, and his lamentations for the next few days touchingly audible.

Having a favourite horse to put in harness in the early gold-field days, I betook me to an establishment in Melbourne where a brake was kept. Of course I mounted the box to watch and perhaps assist in the interesting performance. When the brakesman got up—a good-looking middle-aged man with grey whiskers if he was not a gentleman, and an ex-swell at that, I had never seen one. From his cravat to his well-polished boots—a neat foot, too—from his hat to his accurate dogskin gloves, he was 'good form.' He might have walked straight out of one of Whyte Melville's novels.

His 'hands,' in stable language, were perfection, and as he and the brake-horse between them, with practised adroitness, conducted the drag and my Zohrab, a slashing grey son of Donald Caird, out of the yard and up Lonsdale Street, I felt a measureless pity for the dear old man, who, doubtless failing to score at Bendigo or Sandhurst, had come down to this for a livelihood. Charmed with his conversation and manners, I am afraid I prolonged the lesson unduly, for when we returned my aristocratic friend was urgently required to