Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/597

. 22, 1862.]

“,” said one of a party of diggers snugly ensconced one rainy winter’s night in front of the Red Shirt Store’s huge chimney, piled high with blazing logs, “spin us a yarn.”

The doctor, nothing loth to display his talents, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, finished his grog, pushed his glass over to be filled again, and began as follows:

Fortune has made me a digger, but my uncle intended me for a physician. He was a crusty old bachelor, generous and open-handed, but irascible and obstinate. My father, his brother, having been a genius, had naturally come to grief. He married my mother for her beauty, which was her sole dower. It would have been a good thing for both of them, had Heaven taken away a trifle of the beauty on the one side and the genius on the other, and endowed each with a little sound sense. After a life of makeshifts, they both died when I was very young, leaving me nothing for my fortune but a fair share of the gifts which they had individually possessed. Did not old Jack Godfrey say of me, when I set his leg, that I was the cleverest chap in Victoria? And Bill, the fop, will bear testimony to the effect of my appearance, as I have cut him clean out of the good graces of the fair landlady of the Pick and Shovel. About my common sense I won’t brag, but I fancy I have acquired a wrinkle or two since I came to this golden country. Well, while my father was dissipating what little patrimony he had possessed in wild schemes, each of which was certain to bring him in at least a million, only it didn’t, my uncle commenced business in a small way, saved and scraped, and when my parents died, in spite of the continual drain his brother had been upon him, was tolerably well off. When a lad, his great desire had been to be a doctor. Circumstances prevented the wish being gratified; but at any rate he determined that I should become one. So he sent me to a capital school, where I remained till I was eighteen, picking up a very small allowance of learning and a great deal of cricket and foot-ball, and then I was apprenticed to the principal surgeon in the town, from whom I acquired what little knowledge of medicine I possess. Now I have given you all this information, not because it has in the slightest degree anything to do with my story, but simply for the sheer pleasure of talking about myself; so, if you wish to raise any objections, you had better do so while I am taking a pull at my grog. (After a long draught the narrator continued.) When I was twenty-one I came up to a London hospital My old uncle made