“Jim,” says I,“and to think we’ve lived all our lives up to this time and never set eyes on it before. Don’t it seem as if one was shut up in the bush, or tied to a gum tree, so as one can never have a chance to see anything? I wonder we stayed in it so long.”

“It’s not a bad place, though it is rather slow and wired in some-times,” says Jim. “We might be sorry we ever left it yet. When does the steamer go to Melbourne?”

“The day after to-morrow.”

“I’ll be glad to clear off; won’t you?”

We went to the theatre that night, and amused ourselves pretty well next day and till the time came for our boat to start for Melbourne. We had altered ourselves a bit, had our hair cut and our beards trimmed by the hairdresser. We bought fresh clothes, and what with this, and the feeling of being in a new place and having more money in our pockets than we’d ever dreamed about before, we looked so transmogrified when we saw ourselves in the glass that we hardly knew ourselves. We had to change our names, too, for the first time in our lives; and it went harder against the grain than you’d think, for all we were a couple of cattle-duffers, with a warrant apiece sure to be after us before the year was out.

“It sounds ugly,” says Jim, after we had given our names as John Simmons and Henry Smith at the hotel where we put up at till the steamer was ready to start. “I never thought that Jim Marston was to come to this—to be afraid to tell a fat, greasy-looking fellow like that innkeeper what his real name was. Seems such a pitiful mean lie, don’t it, Dick?”

“It isn’t so bad as being called No. 14, No. 221, as they sing out for the fellows in Berrima Gaol. How would you like that, Jim?”

“I’d blow my brains out first,” cried out Jim, “or let some other fellow do it for me. It wouldn’t matter which.”

It was very pleasant, those two or three days in Adelaide, if they’d only lasted. We used to stroll about the lighted streets till all hours, watching the people and the shops and everything that makes a large city different from the country. The different sorts of people, the carts and carriages, buggies and drays, pony-carriages and spring-carts, all jumbled up together; even the fruit and flowers and oysters and fish under the gas-lights seemed strange and wonderful to us. We felt as if we would have given all the world to have got mother and Aileen down to see it all. Then Jim gave a groan.