But (and I who write have many a time witnessed the transformation) it is by no means so easy to recognise the 'lapsed gentleman' after he has, for whim, indolence, or necessity, played the bush labourer for a year or two. The roughened hands, the altered expression of face, the gradual disappearance of _les nuances_, the minor society tricks of expression and manner, the rough habiliments, the changed step--all these and more--the inevitable concomitants of the comparatively rude life of the miner, the 'sundowner,' the shepherd or boundary-rider--denote the disrated aristocrat. Any one of the subdivisions of Australian manual labour _does_ inevitably, indisputably, change and disguise the individual, of whatever previous history. There are exceptions, doubtless; but such are rare. In addition to the safeguards which a miner's garb, daily labour, and rude association provided against recognition, Lance had practised of set purpose the slang phrases and ungrammatical idioms common among men of his adopted occupation. This kind of verbal deterioration is more easy to acquire by careless habit than to relinquish when an upper stratum of society is again reached, as relatives of young men returning from 'back block' sojourns or 'northern territory' explorations have discovered to their regret. Taking his privations into consideration, it must not be considered very wonderful that the 'Ballarat Harry' of Omeo was a different-appearing personage from the Lance Trevanion of No. 6, Growlers', much more the haughty, rebellious heir of Wychwood. The expected morning broke--a transcendent day of early spring, known even to this mountain land, mist-shrouded and storm-swept though it be in its winter garb. The sky was cloudless, the air breezeless, as the sun uplifted his golden shield over the forest-clothed shoulders of the Bogong and the Buffalo. As the pearl-gray tints of the dawn-light insensibly dissolved,--losing themselves, even as had the darker hues of the earlier morning, in a bath of delicatest pink, enriched ere the eye could trace the translucence with hues prodigal of crimson and burnished gold,--the austere marble-white snow-peaks appeared to stand forth in yet more awful and supernal splendour. Contrasted with colouring of indescribable brilliancy, they appeared a company of phantasmal apparitions in the silence of that wondrous dawn pageant.