The Poacher. 359 



London detective was set on his trail, he did not long escape. He 

 was apprehended in London, tried at our next assizes, and sentence 

 of death recorded against him. The other man was never taken ; 

 and Hammerton's sullen remark that he " never would split upon a 

 pal, even if the halter was round his neck," gave the police very 

 little hopes of obtaining any information from him. Hammerton 

 was transported for life. After serving in a convict gang for some 

 years, he obtained a ticket of leave j and when the diggings first 

 broke out, like many others of his stamp, had an extraordinary run 

 of luck. But his eyesight failed him, and he set up a weather- 

 boarded lodging-house and sly grog-shop on Forest Creek. A young 

 man from the same village, who was working on the Creek, chanced 

 one afternoon to go in, and, as no one else was in the shanty, he 

 got into conversation with a hairy, purblind old ruffian, who was 

 smoking his pipe on a log. One question an " old hand" invariably 

 asks you as soon as you begin to talk with him is, " And what 

 part of the old country do you come out of?" and the young 

 digger found himself unexpectedly a guest of a man from the same 

 village as himself a man whom he had never seen, but of whom 

 he had often heard, and a man, moreover, who appeared to feel 

 very little remorse for the crimes he had committed, for he told the 



digger his only regret was that " he could not get his b eyes 



back again and return home, in which case he would be as bad as 

 ever he had been." 



There are many such men in the bush and on the diggings 

 ruffians on whose faces the " overseer's brand" (a broken nose) is 

 indelibly imprinted men of whom, on looking at their brutal, har- 

 dened countenances, you are tempted to ask yourself " Could such 

 a man ever have been a baby ?" men whose chief delight seems 

 to be to compare notes and growl out their deeds of villany in their 

 peculiar colonial slang, as they smoke their short pipes on an even- 

 ing in the log-hut or round the camp-fire. I have sat and listened 

 scores of times to their conversations, but I do not believe I ever in 

 a single instance heard one such man utter a sentence of regret for 

 his past life. 



