Now, Mr. Mahony, I have been open with you. Be equally frank with
me. You are an Irishman?"
Candour invariably disarmed Mahony--even lay a little heavy on him,
with the weight of an obligation. He retaliated with a light touch of
self-depreciation. "An Irishman, sir, in a country where the Irish have
fallen, and not without reason, into general disrepute."
Over a biscuit and a glass of sherry he gave a rough outline of the
circumstances that had led to his leaving England, two years previously,
and of his dismayed arrival in what he called "the cesspool of 1852".
"Thanks to the rose-water romance of the English press, many a young man
of my day was enticed away from a modest competency, to seek his fortune
here, where it was pretended that nuggets could be gathered like
cabbages--I myself threw up a tidy little country practice. . . . I
might mention that medicine was my profession. It would have given me
intense satisfaction, Mr. Turnham, to see one of those glib journalists
in my shoes, or the shoes of some of my messmates on the OCEAN QUEEN.
There were men aboard that ship, sir, who were reduced to beggary before
they could even set foot on the road to the north. Granted it is the
duty of the press to encourage emigration--"
"Let the press be, Mahony," said Turnham: he had sat back, crossed his
legs, and put his thumbs in his armholes. "Let it be. What we need here
is colonists--small matter how we get 'em."
Having had his say, Mahony scamped the recital of his own sufferings:
the discomforts of the month he had been forced to spend in Melbourne
getting his slender outfit together; the miseries of the tramp to
Ballarat on delicate unused feet, among the riff-raff of nations, under
a wan December sky, against which the trunks of the gum-trees rose
whiter still, and out of which blazed a copper sun with a misty rim.
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