As Jim and his friends came in by Specimen Hill, they saw bodies of troopers being moved as if in drill at the camp on their left. These operations were watched by hundreds of diggers. Further on they saw the massed red coats of swaddies, and heard the faint rattle of kettle-drums. The British flag floated over the camp. A mounted officer in crimson and gold passed them, riding at a gallop, and the sound of a gunshot struck upon their ears, a sharp note of war.
Main Road and Plank Road were well-defined streets of tents and stores. The great majority of the dwellings and places of business were of canvas still, but here and there a pretentious weatherboard hotel, iron-roofed, stood proudly eminent, luring the diggers with a flaring topical sign. Here again the way was crowded with blue-shirted men, smoking, talking, gesticulating, never a coat nor a petticoat amongst them. There were a good many women in Ballarat in '54, but nearly all miners' wives, little was seen of them where the men assembled. Jim noted yet again juvenile levity of the diggers.
The situation was serious enough in all conscience, but the great majority of the miners refused to see it in that light. They had endured much; they felt that it was necessary to assert their rights as men, but the consciousness of their wrongs was borne down in a measure by the light-heartedness that follows great good fortune. Under the influence of a digger-drive or the stimulus of an impassioned speech they could feel keenly; but the sun shone upon them, the virgin gold glowed in their hands, the riot of devil-me-care existence, unchecked by social restraints, called them, and bitterness could not live in their hearts. They danced, and sang, and roared, and were glad, who two or three hours earlier might have offered their lives freely to avenge a slight or to mark their sense of a gross injustice.
Jim and his friends were served with a rough dinner at one of the hotels. The waiter, an old Frenchman, told them that bands sent out by the insurgent leader were taking levies on all hands.
'Some gather at Eureka. Ze fight mus' be soon,' he said; 'but ze crowd--ah, zey laugh, zey drink, zey dance wis ze fiddle, zey will not believe! Et ces a great pity, but zey haff not ze--what, ah?--ze experience.'
