when the Louth chaps see an unbroken procession of dead marines
for three or four days they know that Bourke's drunk. The poor,
God-abandoned "whaler" sits in his hungry camp at sunset and watches
the empty symbols of Hope go by, and feels more God-forgotten than ever
-- and thirstier, if possible -- and gets a great, wide, thirsty,
quaking, empty longing to be up where those bottles come from.
If the townspeople knew how much misery they caused by their thoughtlessness
they would drown their dead marines, or bury them, but on no account
allow them to go drifting down the river, and stirring up hells
in the bosoms of less fortunate fellow-creatures.

There came a man from Adelaide to Bourke once, and he collected
all the empty bottles in town, stacked them by the river,
and waited for a boat. What he wanted them for the legend sayeth not,
but the people reckoned he had a "private still", or something of that sort,
somewhere down the river, and were satisfied. What he came from Adelaide for,
or whether he really did come from there, we do not know.
All the Darling bunyips are supposed to come from Adelaide.
Anyway, the man collected all the empty bottles he could lay his hands on,
and piled them on the bank, where they made a good show.
He waited for a boat to take his cargo, and, while waiting, he got drunk.
That excited no comment. He stayed drunk for three weeks,
but the townspeople saw nothing unusual in that. In order to become
an object of interest in their eyes, and in that line,
he would have had to stay drunk for a year and fight three times a day
-- oftener, if possible -- and lie in the road in the broiling heat
between whiles, and be walked on by camels and Afghans and free-labourers,
and be locked up every time he got sober enough to smash a policeman,
and try to hang himself naked, and be finally squashed by a loaded wool team.