shallow water. Occasional gusts of the hot north wind seemed to lift the
Street like a blanket, and shake its yellow, insinuating dust in the
faces of the people.

Here Done found the characteristic lassitude of the unemployed digger and
the surging life of a town suddenly thronged with the adventurous men of
the earth blended in a strange medley. Men were lounging everywhere,
talking and smoking, or merely sunk in a state of abstraction. The talk
was all of digging. The miners were exchanging news, rumour and opinions,
and lying about their past takings, or the fabulous patches they had just
missed--lying patiently and pertinaciously. Many faces were marked and
discoloured from recent debauches. Lowly inebriates slept peacefully in
the dust, one with his head affectionately pillowed on a dog that snarled
and snapped at anyone coming within three feet of its master.

There was little variety in the dress worn. Even the man who had not been
two miles from Melbourne affected the manner of the digger, and donned
his uniform. Cabbage-tree hats or billycocks were on every head, and for
the rest a gray or blue jumper tucked into Clay-stained trousers and
Wellington boots satisfied the majority. A few swells and 'flash' diggers
exhibited a lively fancy in puggaries and silk sashes and velvet
corduroys and natty patent-leather leggings, but anything more
pretentious was received with unmistakable manifestations of popular
disfavour. A large bullock-team hauling a waggon load of bales blundered
slowly along the road, the weary cattle swinging from side to side under
the lash of the bullocky, who yelled hoarse profanity with the volubility
of an auctioneer and the vocabulary of a Yankee skipper unchecked by
authority. A little further on another team, drawn up before a hotel, lay
sprawling, half buried, the patient bullocks twisted into painful angles
by reason of their yokes, quietly chewing the cud. Riders and drivers