Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/25

 And, again they'd talk lower and more mysterious like, and perhaps mother would be passing the wood-heap and catch a word, and ask:

'Who was she, Tom?'

And Tom―Father―would say:

'Oh, you didn't know her, Mary; she belonged to a family Bill knew at home.'

And Bill would look solemn till mother had gone, and then they would smile a quiet smile, and stretch and say, 'Ah, well!' and start something else.

They had yarns for the fireside, too, some of those old mates of our father's, and one of them would often tell how a girl―a queen of the diggings―was married, and had her wedding-ring made out of the gold of that field; and how the diggers weighed their gold with the new wedding-ring―for luck―by hanging the ring on the hook of the scales and attaching their chamois-leather gold bags to it (whereupon she boasted that four hundred ounces of the precious metal passed through her wedding-ring); and how they lowered the young bride, blindfolded, down a golden hole in a big bucket, and got her to point out the drive from which the gold came that her ring was made out of. The point of this story seems to have been lost―or else we forgot it―but it was characteristic. Had the girl been lowered down a duffer, and asked to point out the way to the gold, and had she done so successfully, there would have been some sense in it.

And they would talk of King, and Maggie Oliver, and G. V. Brooke, and others, and remember how the diggers went five miles out to meet the coach that