While the Billy Boils

While the Billy Boils

By Henry Lawson.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Preface to the First Edition
4. While the Billy Boils
   1. An Old Mate of Your Father’s
   2. Settling on the Land
   3. Enter Mitchell
   4. Stiffner and Jim
   5. When the Sun Went Down
   6. The Man Who Forgot
   7. Hungerford
   8. A Camp-Fire Yarn
   9. His Country-After All
   10. A Day on a Selection
   11. That There Dog o’ Mine
   12. Going Blind
   13. Arvie Aspinall’s Alarm Clock
   14. Stragglers
   15. The Union Buries Its Dead
   16. On the Edge of a Plain
   17. In a Dry Season
   18. He’d Come Back
   19. Another of Mitchell’s Plans for the Future
   20. Steelman
   21. Drifted Back
   22. Remailed
   23. Mitchell Doesn’t Believe in the Sack
   24. Shooting the Moon
   25. His Father’s Mate
   26. An Echo from the Old Bark School
   27. The Shearing of the Cook’s Dog
   28. “Dossing Out” and “Camping”
   29. Across the Straits
   30. The Drover’s Wife
   31. Steelman’s Pupil
   32. An Unfinished Love Story
   33. Board and Residence
   34. His Colonial Oath
   35. “Some Day”
   36. A Visit of Condolence
   37. In a Wet Season
   38. “Rats”
   39. Mitchell: A Character Sketch
   40. The Bush Undertaker
   41. Our Pipes
   42. Coming Across—A Study in the Steerage
   43. The Story of Malachi
   44. Two Dogs and a Fence
   45. Jones’s Alley
   46. “Brummy Usen”
   47. Bogg of Geebung
   48. She Wouldn’t Speak
   49. The Geological Spieler
   50. Macquarie’s Mate
   51. Baldy Thompson
   52. For Auld Lang Syne
5. Colophon
6. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Preface to the First Edition

In the absence of the author, who is now resident in Western Australia, it devolves upon us to make the customary acknowledgments to the various journals from which these stories are reprinted. Most of them first appeared in the Sydney Bulletin, a number of them in the Sydney Worker, and others in the New Zealand Mail, the New Zealand Times, Sydney Truth, the Brisbane Boomerang, the Maryborough Patriot, and The Antipodean, while two are now published for the first time.

We might rightly be deemed ungrateful did we not take this opportunity of thanking the Press of Australia and New Zealand for the aid they have given us in our effort to publish here, and in a presentable form, the work of some of our living writers. Especially are our thanks due to the proprietors of the Sydney Bulletin who have in many ways assisted us.

The Publishers

Sydney, 14th August, 1896.

While the Billy Boils

An Old Mate of Your Father’s

You remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hats, as “An old mate of your father’s on the diggings, Johnny.” And he would pat our heads and say we were fine boys, or girls⁠—as the case may have been⁠—and that we had our father’s nose but our mother’s eyes, or the other way about; and say that the baby was the dead spit of its mother, and then added, for father’s benefit: “But yet he’s like you, Tom.” It did seem strange to the children to hear him address the old man by his Christian name⁠—considering that the mother always referred to him as “Father.” She called the old mate Mr. So-and-so, 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