Wl4 NATTJBAL HISTOIIT SKETCHES. 



sions a general gloom overspreads the whole of the little 

 community. 3?ar away from medical aid, the sufferer has 

 to trust to such simple remedies as are at hand, and 

 patiently await the issue. It is now that the rough 

 sympathies of his mates are fairly awakened, and each 

 one vies with the other in assisting and consoling the 

 sick man. A hardy constitution generally " pulls him 

 through ; " but when his complaint is beyond the help 

 of man, he calmly resigns himself to his fate, and dies 

 " unhonoured and " in many instances " unknown ; " for 

 very often a man in this country knows very little more 

 of his mate than his name. If visions of youth and 

 home do flit across the mind of the dying man, it too 

 often happens that there is not one among the strangers 

 who stand around his death-bed with whom he can in- 

 trust a last message to his relatives and friends in the 

 old country, who will probably wait month after month 

 with " the sickening anxiety of hope deferred" for 

 tidings of the absentee, which will now, perhaps, never 

 reach them. This is one of the darkest pictures in bush 

 life, but it is one which, in the early days of the dig- 

 gings, was too true. I have seen death in more shapes 

 than one in the bush, and it is then, and then only, that 

 a true sense of the loneliness of his life breaks fully upon 

 the wanderer's mind ; and as he misses his old comrade 

 from the evening bivouac around the camp-fire, he smokes 

 his pipe in silence, thoughts of his own happy home in 

 early days will pass, like bright but transient gleams of 

 sunshine across the field of memory, and for a while his 



