While the Billy Boils


While the Billy Boils frontispiece

'They would talk of some old lead.'

While the Billy Boils


BY

HENRY LAWSON

Author of When the World Was Wide, and Other Verses; Joe Wilson and His Mates; On the Track and Over the Sliprails; Verses, Popular and Humorous; When I Was King, and Other Verses; Children of the Bush; etc.


LONDON

ANGUS AND ROBERTSON Ltd.

1913

Printed by

Marchant & Co., Ltd., Sydney

for

Angus & Robertson Limited.


London: The Oxford University Press,

Amen Corner, E.C.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.

In the absence of the author, who is now resident in Western Australia, it devolves upon us to make the customary acknowledgments to the various journals from which these stories are reprinted. Most of them first appeared in the Sydney Bulletin, a number of them in the Sydney Worker, and others in the New Zealand Mail, the New Zealand Times, Sydney Truth, the Brisbane Boomerang, the Maryborough Patriot, and The Antipodean, while two are now published for the first time.

We might rightly be deemed ungrateful did we not take this opportunity of thanking the Press of Australia and New Zealand for the aid they have given us in our effort to publish here, and in a presentable form, the works of some of our living writers. Especially are our thanks due to the proprietors of the Sydney Bulletin who have in many ways assisted us.

THE PUBLISHERS,


Sydney, 14th August, 1896.

Table of Contents


An Old Mate of Your Father's
Settling on the Land
Enter Mitchell
Stiffner and Jim (Thirdly, Bill)
When the Sun Went Down
The Man Who Forgot
Hungerford
A Camp-Fire Yarn
His Country—After All
A Day on a Selection
That There Dog o' Mine
Going Blind
Arvie Aspinall's Alarm Clock
Stragglers
On the Edge of a Plain
In a Dry Season
He'd Come Back
Another of Mitchell's Plans for the Future
Steelman
Drifted Back
Remailed
Mitchell Doesn't Believe in the Sack
Shooting the Moon
His Father's Mate
An Echo from the Old Bark School
The Shearing of the Cook's Dog
Dossing out and Camping
Across the Straits
The Drover's Wife
Steelman's Pupil
An Unfinished Love Story
Board and Residence
Some Day
A Visit of Condolence
In a Wet Season
Rats
Mitchell: A Character Sketch
The Bush Undertaker
Our Pipes
Coming Across—A Study In The Steerage
The Story of Malachi
Two Dogs and a Fence
Jones's Alley
Brummy Usen
Bogg of Geebung
She Wouldn't Speak
The Geological Spieler
Macquarie's Mate
Baldy Thompson
For Auld Lang Syne