"Has the master been yet?"

"No."

"Bend down, Joe. I went for the note, and the logs gave way.
I meant to be back before they was up. I dropped it down inside the bed;
you watch your chance and get it; and say you forgot it last night
-- say you didn't like to give it -- that won't be a lie.
Tell the master I'm -- I'm sorry -- tell the master never to send
no notes no more -- except by girls -- that's all. . . . Mother!
Take the blankets off me -- I'm dyin'."




The Story of the Oracle



"We young fellows," said "Sympathy Joe" to Mitchell, after tea,
in their first camp west the river -- "and you and I ARE young fellows,
comparatively -- think we know the world. There are plenty of young chaps
knocking round in this country who reckon they've been through it all
before they're thirty. I've met cynics and men-o'-the-world,
aged twenty-one or thereabouts, who've never been further than
a trip to Sydney. They talk about `this world' as if they'd knocked around
in half-a-dozen other worlds before they came across here --
and they are just as off-hand about it as older Australians are
when they talk about this colony as compared with the others. They say: