The two chums foot-rotted until they had earned thirty shillings each, then they went away and got drunk at a roadside shanty; at least, Bez did, and when the convict picked his pockets, he kindly put back three shillings and sixpence, saying, “That will give him another start on the wallaby track.”

Bez at last arrived at Flagstaff Hill, which was then bare, with a sand-hole on one side of it.  He had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and had only one shilling and sixpence in his pocket, which he was loath to spend for fear of arriving in Melbourne a complete beggar.  He lay down famishing and weary on the top of the hill near Flagstaff, and surveyed the city, the bay, and the shipping.  He had hoped by this time to have been ready to take a passage in one of those ships to Liverpool, and to return home a lucky digger.  But he had only eighteen pence, so he said, “I am afraid, Bez, you will never see Manchester again.”

There was at that time a small frame building at the west end of Flinders Street, with a hill behind it, on which goats were browsing; the railway viaduct runs now over the exact spot.  Many parties of hopeful diggers from England and California had slept there on the floor the night before they started for Ballarat, Mount Alexander, or Bendigo.  We called it a house of refuge, and Bez now looked for refuge in it.  There he met Dan and Moran, who had both found employment in the city, and they fed the hungry Bez.  Dan was labouring at his trade in the building business, and he set Bez to work roofing houses with corrugated iron.  They soon earned more money than they had ever earned by digging for gold, but on Saturday nights and Sundays they took their pleasure in the old style, and so they went to the dogs.  I don’t know how Dan’s life ended (his real name was Donald Fraser), but Bez died suddenly in the bar of a public-house, and he was honoured with an inquest and a short paragraph in the papers.

Moran had saved a hundred pounds by digging in Picaninny Gully, and he was soon afterwards admitted to serve Her Majesty again in the police department.  On the Sunday after Price was murdered by the convicts at Williamstown I met Moran after Mass in the middle of Lonsdale Street.  I reproached him for his baseness in deserting to the enemy—­Her Majesty, no less—­and in self-defence he nearly argued my head off.  At last I threatened to denounce him as a “Joey” —­he was in plain clothes—­and have him killed by the crowd in the street.  Nothing but death could silence Moran.  The rest of his history is engraved on a monument in the Melbourne Cemetery; he, his wife, and all his children died many years ago.—­R.I.P.  He was really a good man, with only one defect—­most of us have many—­he was always trying to divide a hair ’twixt West and South-West side.