Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/72

 then I cleared out to 'Frisco. I swore I'd never go back again, and I never will.'

'But surely you'll take a run over and have a look at old Sydney and those places, before you go back to America, after getting so near?'

'What the blazes do I want to have a look at the blamed country for?' snapped the stranger, who had refreshed considerably. 'I've got nothing to thank Australia for except getting out of it. It's the best country to get out of that I was ever in.'

'Oh, well, I only thought you might have had some friends over there,' interposed the traveller in an injured tone.

'Friends! That's another reason. I wouldn't go back there for all the friends and relations since Adam. I had more than quite enough of it while I was there. The worst and hardest years of my life were spent in Australia. I might have starved there, and did do it half my time. I worked harder and got less in my own country in five years than I ever did in any other in fifteen'―he was getting mixed―'and I've been in a few since then. No, Australia is the worst country that ever the Lord had the sense to forget. I mean to stick to the country that stuck to me, when I was starved out of my own dear native land―and that country is the United States of America. What's Australia? A big, thirsty, hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for the convenience of foreign speculators, and a few collections of humpies, called towns―also for the convenience of foreign speculators: and populated mostly by mongrel sheep, and partly by fools, who live like European