`I promised mother last time I had more than was good for me at Dargo Races
that I wouldn't touch it again for two years; and I won't either.
I can stand what any other man can, and without the hard stuff, either.'

`Please yourself,' said father. `When you're ready we'll have a ride
through the stock.'

We finished our meal, and a first-rate one it was. A man never has
the same appetite for his meals anywhere else that he has in the bush,
specially if he has been up half the night. It's so fresh,
and the air makes him feel as if he'd ate nothing for a week.
Sitting on a log, or in the cave, as we were, I've had the best meal
I've ever tasted since I was born. Not like the close-feeling,
close-smelling, dirty-clean graveyard they call a gaol.
But it's no use beginning on that. We were young men, and free, too. Free!
By all the devils in hell, if there are devils -- and there must be
to tempt a man, or how could he be so great a fool, so blind a born idiot,
as to do anything in this world that would put his freedom in jeopardy?
And what for? For folly and nonsense. For a few pounds he could earn
with a month's honest work and be all the better man for it.
For a false woman's smile that he could buy, and ten like her,
if he only kept straight and saving. For a bit of sudden pride
or vanity or passion. A short bit of what looks like pleasure,
against months and years of weariness, and cold and heat, and dull half-death,
with maybe a dog's death at the end!

I could cry like a child when I think of it now. I have cried
many's the time and often since I have been shut up here,
and dashed my head against the stones till I pretty nigh knocked
all sense and feeling out of it, not so much in repentance, though I don't say