‘I often wonder now what could have possessed me an’ Bill to go in for such a thing as farmin’. But there, when a chap’s luck’s out diggin’, he’s glad to tackle anythin’ for a change!
‘Presently one or two more, men with fam’lies, settles close to us and tries to make a livin’. It didn’t amount to much. Then up comes a string o’ Germans, trampin’ along from the coast, carryin’ furniture an’ tools, beds—ay, even their old women—on their backs. An’ they settles, an’ starts the same game—clearin’, an’ ploughin’, an’ sowin’. But I couldn’t see as any of ’em was makin’ a pile. They worked like bullocks, women an’ all, late an’ early. The harder they worked, the poorer they seemed to get. Bill an’ me had a pound or two saved up for a rainy day. But they had nothin’; an’ how they lived was a mystery. So, you see, takin’ things all round, it was high time somethin’ turned up. An’ somethin’ did. The next farm to us belonged to a married couple. He was a runaway sailor. She’d been a passenger on board. They had one child, just turned four year old, an’ they was both fair wrapped up in that kid.
‘If Dot’s—Dot was his pet name—finger only ached, the work might go to Jericho.
‘An’ indeed he were a most loveable little chap. With regards to him, we was all of us ’most as bad as the father an’ mother, the way we played with him an’ petted him. There was no denyin’ Dot of anythin’ once he looked at you out o’ those big blue eyes o’ his. And the knowledgeableness of him! No wonder Jim Fairleigh an’ his missis thought the sun rose every mornin’ out o’ the back o’ their boy’s neck.’
‘No more ’m I,’ he continued, ‘or I don’t s’pose I’d be here yarning a night like this.’
‘It’s a wonder,’ I said, ‘that none of these jolly-looking _Fräuleins_ about here have been able to take your fancy.’
‘Well, to tell the truth,’ he replied, with, however, a rather conscious expression on his face, ‘I think what those poor Fairleighs went through rather scared me of marryin’.
‘But, as I was sayin’, farmin’ didn’t seem to agree with my mate, Bill—that’s him you seen at the claim to-day—spite o’ his past experience, any more’n it did with me. _He_ done the business, by-the-bye, quite lately with a bouncin’ gal—Lieschen Hertzog—an’ now stays at home o’ nights.