I am wearin’ my heart out for you.
Is that not a sympathetic expression of honest feeling, of true affection, that has gone out thousands of times to “the boys in the West”? In pieces like “Old Bill Bates” the note of mateship is struck; the note that has been the keynote of so many Western lives linked in the hearty give-and-take comradeship of two men—two bound closer, almost, than husband and wife, by long-shared [25] ]years of effort together. “At Bummer’s Creek” warrants all that has been said of the manly virtue of Western poetry—and is there anyone who has worked with men who has not found Dave’s mate?
We two were fitted, j’int for j’int,
And toiled and starved and spreed,
But one’d watch around the stump
When t’other one was treed,
The same when Luck was in full bloom
As when she run ter seed.
That is not refined poetry; but it is essentially poetry; and let us never forget that all the refinements of life spring from precisely such realities as are illustrated by this humble “battler.” That a lady from whose body and mind every speck and thought of defilement are kept, may walk sedately down the shady side of St. George’s Terrace, some such man as Bill’s mate must have sweated crudely in the region of Kalgoorlie. The fancy is far-fetched, but it has a real basis; a large part of the burden of civilization is borne by “humble battlers;” and it is to the breed of these “battlers” that we look for civilization’s defence in the day of challenge. Let not the flower despise its roots.
The lines for “Our Goldfields Spring” are outspoken: