"You often have trouble here in Ballarat?" Fred asked.
"Well, no, I can't say that I see much of it. Sometimes the fellers make a rumpus, but they generally let me alone, and that's all I ax of 'em. But whar's that 'ere licker we's to have? 'Pears to me it's rather slow in getting 'long."
"Here it comes," shouted Charley, bustling around the crowded room, if, indeed, room it could be called. "I had to wait for it to be unloaded, Ben, 'cos it arrived only an hour or two ago from Sydney."
"You say it's the real New York first proof whiskey, do ye?" asked Ben, holding a tumbler two thirds full of the stuff up to the light, and scanning its color with a critical eye.
"The real thing, and no mistake. It's just sich as you used to git when chopping away down in the backwoods of Maine," replied Charley.
We then discovered, what we had all along suspected, that the miner was an American, and belonged in the Eastern State.
"Come, ain't you fellers a goin' to drink with us? That ain't exactly the thing, you know. There ain't no aristocracy in these parts. Every feller is tree and equal, as the old Constitution of the States says."
We could not withstand Ben's pressing intimation that we were to consider ourselves no better than others present, and after waiting five minutes for a chance at a glass, we managed to swallow a few mouthfuls of the vile stuff.
"That's the ticket!" he cried, when he saw that we were disposed to follow his example; "nothing like good whiskey to keep a man all right, at the mines. I don't drink much myself, but I've no objections to other people taking a nip now and then."
As he spoke, he held out his glass for another nip, and the attentive Charley, with an eye to his profits, quickly filled it.