in this way: Charley Webber, the young fellow I was travelling with,
got a letter from some relations in New Zealand, advising him to settle there;
so he offered me his plant for two-thirds of its value--fifty notes down
and fifty more when he would send for it. Sheer good-nature of him,
for he knew he could have the lot if he liked. But there's not many fellows
of Charley's stamp. So I paid him the fifty notes and we parted.
He was to send me his address as soon as he reached New Zealand;
but he never got there. The vessel was wrecked on some place they call
the North Spit; and Charley was one of the missing. Never heard of him
from that day to this."

"Good (ensanguined) shot!" remarked Mosey. "I wish that same specie
of a curse would come on me."

"My (ensanguined) colonial!" assented Dixon and Bum, with one accord.

"Well, nobody knows anything about the geography of New Zealand,"
continued Thompson, "and I purposely forgot the address of Charley's people.
Any honest man would have hunted them up, but that was n't my style;
I was n't a wheat-sample; I was a tare. Compromised with my conscience.
Thought there was no time to lose in making an independence--making haste
to be rich, and considering not that's there's many a slip between the cup
and the lip, as Solomon puts it. I said to myself, 'That's all right;
I'll pay it some time.' Now see the consequence----"

"Just two years after I bid the poor fellow good-bye-two years to the very day,
and not very lucky years neither--I found myself in the middle
of the Death Track, with flour for Wilcannia; one wagon left behind,
and the bullocks dropping off like fish out of water; bullocks worth ten notes
going as if they were n't worth half-a-crown. It was like the retreat