" PASSETH ALL UNDERSTANDING " 



" Whence has the man the balm that brightens all ?" 



Browning. 



Though not popular, perhaps Tsing Hi was the best 

 known of his contemporaries on the tableland through 

 which the Palmer River wanders a hundred miles from 

 the Gulf of Carpentaria. Short, slimly made as a 

 fourteen-year-old boy, nimble, fussy, plausible, he stood 

 out from among his countrymen as one having authority, 

 while he posed among the Europeans as a kind of diplo- 

 matic agent, explaining away misunderstandings, con- 

 ciliating grievances, and generall)'' comporting himself 

 as the chartered representative of the horde of yellow 

 new-chums which invaded the most sensational of all 

 Australian goldficlds. He appeared to have cousins 

 among ever}- fresh shipload from China, as well as among 

 the hundreds who ferreted in the gullies. There was not 

 a white man, from the Police Magistrate to Frank 

 Deester's off-sider, with whom he was not on terms of 

 easy familiarity. 



Had he not often confidentially consulted the Warden 

 when a cousin had blundered into the hands of the police, 

 embarrassing that flustered official with torrents of half- 

 intelligible speech, the purport of which generally was 

 to flout the proceedings with evidence of indubitable 

 alibi ? All this he translated to his countrymen as 

 proof of personal influence with court authorities, 



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