Leave the place we had to do at once. It wouldn’t do to be strollin’ about Melbourne with the chance of every policeman we met taking a look at us to see if we tallied with a full description they had at the office: “Richard and James Marston are twenty-five and twenty-two, respectively; both tall and strongly built; having the appearance of bushmen. Richard Marston has a scar on left temple. James Marston has lost a front tooth,” and so on. When we came to think of it, they couldn’t be off knowing us, if they took it into their heads to bail us up any day. They had our height and make. We couldn’t help looking like bushmen—like men that had been in the open air all their lives, and that had a look as if saddle and bridle rein were more in our way than the spade and plough-handle. We couldn’t wash the tan off our skins; faces, necks, arms, all showed pretty well that we’d come from where the sun was hot, and that we’d had our share of it. They had my scar, got in a row, and Jim’s front tooth, knocked out by a fall from a horse when he was a boy; there was nothing for it but to cut and run.

“It was time for us to go, my boys,” as the song the Yankee sailor sung us one night runs, and then, which way to go? Every ship was watched that close a strange rat couldn’t get a passage, and, besides, we had that feeling we didn’t like to clear away altogether out of the old country; there was mother and Aileen still in it, and every man, woman and child that we’d known ever since we were born. A chap feels that, even if he ain’t much good other ways. We couldn’t stand the thought of clearin’ out for America, as Starlight advised us. It was like death to us, so we thought we’d chance it somewhere in Australia for a bit longer.

Now where, we put up a good many drovers from Gippsland used to stay, as they brought in cattle from there. The cattle had to be brought over Swanston Street Bridge and right through the town after twelve o’clock at night. We’d once or twice, when we’d been out late, stopped to look at them, and watched the big heavy bullocks and fat cows staring and starting and slipping all among the lamps and pavements, with the streets all so strange and quiet, and laughed at the notion of some of the shopkeepers waking up and seeing a couple of hundred wild cattle, with three or four men behind ‘em, shouldering and horning one another, then rushing past their doors at a hard trot, or breaking into a gallop for a bit.