AN OLD MATE OF YOUR FATHER'S
You remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hats, as 'An old mate of your father's on the diggings, Johnny.' And he would pat our heads and say we were fine boys, or girls―as the case may have been―and that we had our father's nose but our mother's eyes, or the other way about; and say that the baby was the dead spit of its mother, and then add, for father's benefit: 'But yet he's like you, Tom.' It did seem strange to the children to hear him address the old man by his Christian name―considering that the mother always referred to him as 'Father.' She called the old mate Mr. So-and-so, and father called him Bill, or something to that effect.
Occasionally the old mate would come dressed in the latest city fashion, and at other times in a new suit of reach-me-downs, and yet again he would turn up in clean white moleskins, washed tweed coat, Crimean shirt, blucher boots, soft felt hat, with a fresh-looking speckled handkerchief round his neck.
A1
