"One day I found myself standing alone in the street in the drizzling rain, without hope, without a home, and nothing belonging to me except the somewhat tattered clothes I wore. I was near a newspaper office, and was about to enter to beg—not for money, boys, I'd have died sooner—but for work, when I found myself face to face with a man who was, like myself, an artist.
"'Off to the diggings!' he cried merrily. 'Join me, old fellow, join me. We will return as rich as Croesus.'
"'I'd go,' I said, 'but I'm——'
"I turned out my empty pockets.
"'I'll wait for you a week,' he said, 'and you shall work. Come in here.'
"He pulled me inside the very office I had been about to enter; and in a fortnight's time we were both marching away to the diggings, with hopes as high as the fleecy clouds and hearts as—well, as light as our purses.
"Did we succeed? At last we did, after ten years of a life of back-breaking slavery. We stuck together all this time, and our adventures would have filled a lordly volume. We found time, too, to write to the papers, and send many a sketch of life at the diggings.
"We made a pile at last, and gladly agreed to leave this rough-and-tumble life and settle in some town, or come back—this was my idea—to Scotland.
"Fools that we were, we gave what was called a 'glorification' to our friends the night before we were to start on horseback with our pile away through the bush.
"I hate to dwell on this part of my story. But there came that evening to our camp two Irish strangers. They seemed green-hands, and I and my friend took them in and treated them well We talked too freely about our wealth of gold, and we lived to repent it.