I met him in the Full-and-Plenty Dining Rooms. It was a cheap place
in the city, with good beds upstairs let at one shilling per
night--"Board and residence for respectable single men, fifteen
shillings per week." I was a respectable single man then. I boarded
and resided there. I boarded at a greasy little table in the greasy
little corner under the fluffy little staircase in the hot and greasy
little dining-room or restaurant downstairs. They called it
dining-rooms, but it was only one room, and them wasn't half enough
room in it to work your elbows when the seven little tables and
forty-nine chairs were occupied. There was not room for an
ordinary-sized steward to pass up and down between the tables; but our
waiter was not an ordinary-sized man--he was a living skeleton in
miniature. We handed the soup, and the "roast beef one," and
"roast lamb one," "corn beef and cabbage one," "veal and stuffing
one," and the "veal and pickled pork," one--or two, or three, as
the case might be--and the tea and coffee, and the various kinds of
puddings--we handed them over each other, and dodged the drops as well
as we could. The very hot and very greasy little kitchen was
adjacent, and it contained the bathroom and other conveniences, behind
screens of whitewashed boards.

I resided upstairs in a room where there were five beds and one
wash-stand; one candle-stick, with a very short bit of soft yellow
candle in it; the back of a hair-brush, with about a dozen bristles in
it; and half a comb--the big-tooth end--with nine and a half teeth at
irregular distances apart.

He was a typical bushman, not one of those tall, straight, wiry, brown