his woolly coat, it may be a bird, or a grasshopper, but always there is
some little noise that would tell even a blind man that the night is over.
Often you know by the stars how long it will be before daylight, and stir
up the fire, put on the billy, and get the saddles and packs in order.
Sometimes you fix on the wrong star, and are thanked accordingly by your
mate when, with his feet in his cold, clammy boots, he discovers that his
watch reads 2 a.m. Sometimes you have the satisfaction of growling at him,
and occasionally, if you feel in very nasty humour, you may lie "dog-oh"
and watch his early rising, knowing full well the right time; laughter,
however, gives you away, and you are justly rewarded by having the
blankets torn off you. Such simple pranks as these make bearable a life
that would otherwise suffocate you with its monotony.

And yet there is a charm about the bush--the perfect peace in the "free
air of God"--that so takes hold of some men that they can never be happy
anywhere else. Civilisation is a fine thing in its way, but the petty
worries and annoyances, the bustle and excitement, the crowds of people,
the "you can't do this," and "you must do that," the necessity for
dressing in most uncomfortable garments to be like other people, and a
thousand other such matters, so distress a bushman, who, like a caged
beast in a menagerie, wanders from corner to corner and cannot find where
to rest, that he longs for the day that he will again be on the track,
with all his worldly goods with him and the wide world before him. Such
a man in the bush and in the town is as different as a fish in and out of
water.

Some of the finest fellows "outside the tracks" are the least respectable
in civilised places, where before long they can find no better occupation
than drinking, which, owing to months of teetotalism in the bush, they are
less able to stand than the ordinary individual who takes his beer or