"Oh, you didn't know her, Mary; she belonged to a family Bill knew at
home."

And Bill would look solemn till mother had gone, and then they would
smile a quiet smile, and stretch and say, "Ah, well!" and start
something else.

They had yarns for the fireside, too, some of those old mates of our
father's, and one of them would often tell how a girl--a queen of the
diggings--was married, and had her wedding-ring made out of the gold
of that field; and how the diggers weighed their gold with the new
wedding-ring--for luck--by hanging the ring on the hook of the scales
and attaching their chamois-leather gold bags to it (whereupon she
boasted that four hundred ounces of the precious metal passed through
her wedding-ring); and how they lowered the young bride, blindfolded,
down a golden hole in a big bucket, and got her to point out the drive
from which the gold came that her ring was made out of. The point of
this story seems to have been lost--or else we forget it--but it was
characteristic. Had the girl been lowered down a duffer, and asked to
point out the way to the gold, and had she done so successfully, there
would have been some sense in it.

And they would talk of King, and Maggie Oliver, and G. V. Brooke, and
others, and remember how the diggers went five miles out to meet the
coach that brought the girl actress, and took the horses out and
brought her in in triumph, and worshipped her, and sent her off in
glory, and threw nuggets into her lap. And how she stood upon the
box-seat and tore her sailor hat to pieces, and threw the fragments
amongst the crowd; and how the diggers fought for the bits and thrust