and less welcome. By degrees we came to have no further use for our dress suits, and they went the way of so many dress suits in the colonies—to our "uncle."
The rest of our store of clothes followed piece by piece, then all our little knicknacks, our shirt studs, our sleeve links, our silk hats, our swagger boots. Why should we burden ourselves with umbrellas and greatcoats? It never rained, and it was hot as hot could be. At length we were left with nothing except what we stood up in, and, on being turned out of lodgings, we parted in the streets of Melbourne.
My mate and I had tossed up to decide which should stop in the city, which take to the bush. He had won the toss and started up country. I was left alone, fourteen thousand miles from home. It was awful to have no friends; as I got shabbier and shabbier my acquaintances dropped me, and I avoided the streets where I might meet them. I felt my poverty was a reproach to myself, and hated to allow anyone to witness it. Gradually I had fallen until I was one of the forlorn band of waifs that every big city possesses—houseless, hungry and hopeless, whose beds at night are in the streets or on the grass under a tree in some public park.
In Melbourne this didn't matter much, for the weather was intensely hot. It was the hunger that was unbearable. Sometimes I earned a few pennies carrying portmanteaux to the station or holding a horse, but frequently for days I earned nothing. I grew miserably thin and hollow-eyed. Try where I would I could get no work.
I was lying one night alongside a man under a tree in the Treasury Gardens. He was as hungry and miserable as I.
"Say, mate, were you ever in jail?" he asked me suddenly.
"No. Why?"
