my chin. "That's Dago, Sandy," said I pointing to it.
"Well—that's Dago—over there," nodded Sandy with his head. I looked round at the mullock heap, and as I turned, my companion flicked at a blowfly on the off-leader's rump, who, suddenly jumping forward, jerked the old rattle-trap of a coach half across the track.
"Whoa, mare! Whoa! Yes (as we swung into line again at a gallop), that's Dago! Whoa, can't yer?"
But they'd all four got the fidgets, and we flew along the next hundred yards as if the devil was after us.
So that was Dago! It set me thinking—wandering back to New South Wales when I was a lad—a lad on the tramp for gold. Gold I couldn't win in coined sovereigns at home, but with hope in my heart and the dreams of youth, I set out from my ship to dig for from the hard earth of a strange land.
And Sandy told me his memories as we drove through the silent bush. I told Sandy mine in return; and some of the terrible minutes of our lives came back to us both out of the past, and we lived them over again.
I have had other memorable minutes, but I don't remember so much being crammed into one of them as into that one which flashed back through our minds when Sandy said, "You remember Dago?" Yes, I remembered the city of Grafton, which now revels in a bishop, a cathedral and other appliances of civilization when it was only a straggling bush settlement consisting of one accommodation house, perhaps a dozen weatherboard shanties, a forge and a few tents dotted about at irregular distances from one another on either side of one long, straight, grass-grown street.
But Grafton was looked upon even in those days as quite a "place," for it boasted an annual race meeting
