and father called him Bill, or something to that effect.

Occasionally the old mate would come dressed in the latest city
fashion, and at other times in a new suit of reach-me-downs, and yet
again he would turn up in clean white moleskins, washed tweed coat,
Crimean shirt, blucher boots, soft felt hat, with a fresh-looking
speckled handkerchief round his neck. But his face was mostly round
and brown and jolly, his hands were always horny, and his beard grey.
Sometimes he might have seemed strange and uncouth to us at first, but
the old man never appeared the least surprised at anything he said or
did--they understood each other so well--and we would soon take to
this relic of our father's past, who would have fruit or lollies for
us--strange that he always remembered them--and would surreptitiously
slip "shilluns" into our dirty little hands, and tell us stories
about the old days, "when me an' yer father was on the diggin's, an'
you wasn't thought of, my boy."

Sometimes the old mate would stay over Sunday, and in the forenoon or
after dinner he and father would take a walk amongst the deserted
shafts of Sapling Gully or along Quartz Ridge, and criticize old
ground, and talk of past diggers' mistakes, and second bottoms, and
feelers, and dips, and leads--also outcrops--and absently pick up
pieces of quartz and slate, rub them on their sleeves, look at them in
an abstracted manner, and drop them again; and they would talk of some
old lead they had worked on: "Hogan's party was here on one side of
us, Macintosh was here on the other, Mac was getting good gold and so
was Hogan, and now, why the blanky blank weren't we on gold?" And
the mate would always agree that there was "gold in them ridges and
gullies yet, if a man only had the money behind him to git at it."
And then perhaps the guv'nor would show him a spot where he intended