It was our custom to be out all day, but home early and early to bed. We used to take our meals in a low long room which was well aired but poorly lighted, whether by day or night. And here, when tea was over and the womenkind had retired, we smoked, whenever, as often happened, the evening was cold enough to make a shelter desirable; smoked and chatted. There was light enough to see the smoke of your pipe and the faces of those near you; but if you were listening to the chatter of a group in the other end of the room the faces of the speakers were so indistinct as often to give a startling challenge to your imagination if you had one, and if it was accustomed to take the bit in its teeth. I sometimes caught myself partly listening to a story-teller in the other end of the room and partly fashioning a face out of his dimly seen features, which quite belied the honest fellow’s real countenance when the flash of a pipelight or a shifted lamp revealed it more fully. Jack and I were more of listeners than talkers, and we were usually amongst the earliest who retired. But one evening there was a good deal of talk about the new gold-field in the north-west, and a keen-looking bushman who seemed to have just returned from the place began to describe its whereabouts. Then I listened attentively, and at one point in his talk, I started and looked over at Jack, and I saw that he was already looking at me. I got up and left the room without a sign to him, but I knew that he would follow me, and he did. It was bright moonlight, and when we met outside we strolled down to the beach together. It was a wide, long, and lonely beach, lonely to the very last degree, and it was divided from the house by a belt of scrub near a mile wide. We said not a word to one another till we got quite near the sea. Then I turned round and looked Jack in the face and said, “Why, man, it must have been quite near the place.” “No,” said he, “it may have been fifty miles or more away, their knowledge is loose, and their description looser, but it must be somewhere in the neighbourhood, and I suppose they are sure to find it.” “I do not know,” said I; and after a pause I added, “Jack, it seems to me they might pass all over the place and see nothing of what we saw.” “God knows,” he muttered, and then he sat down on a hummock of sand and I beside him. Then he said, “Why have you never told the story, Bob?” “Don’t you know why, Jack?” I answered. “They would lock me up in a madhouse; there would be no one to corroborate me but you, and if you did so you would be locked up along with me.” “That might be,” said he, “if they believed you; but they would not believe you, they would think you were simply romancing.” “What would be the good of speaking then?” said I.