King Billy was given to strolling up and down the streets of Ballarat when that
eviscerated city was merely in process of disembowelment, before alluvial mining
gave way to quartz-crushing, when the individual had a chance, if a very vague
one, of sudden and delightful fortune. The Ballarat blacks were a scaly lot, to talk
of them like ill-fed hogs, as men were wont to do. They dwined and dwindled, as
natives will before the resources of civilisation: the bloodthirsty ones got killed
out; the rumthirsty ones died out; the wild corroboree was reduced to a poverty-
stricken imitation of its former glory. King Billy's authority grew less with the
increase of his clothes. The brass plate with his name on it was about the last
relic of his precarious power, and was chiefly valued as a means of notifying the
public generally that they might stand drinks to a monarch if they saw fit and
were not too humble. He was not haughty, and never presumed on his plate, as
parvenus will. He came of an ancient stock, and could afford to condescend,
even if he could not afford to pay for drinks. He was very kind to children,--white
children, of course,--and was hale-fellow-well-met with many of them.
He was particularly fond of Annie Colborn, whose father was a magistrate and a
gold commissioner, and a person of very great importance. Whether or not King
Billy was wise in his generation, and out of the unwritten Scriptures of the somber
bush had culled a maxim inculcating the wisdom of making friends of the sons of
Mammon, I cannot say, but he was always good to Annie. For my own part, I do
not believe the simple-hearted old king had any such notion inside his thick
antipodean skull. He was good because he was not bad, which is the very best
morality after all, and a great advance on much we hear of. And, besides, he was
sometimes hungry, and Mr. Colborn's Chinese cook was very haughty, and not to
be approached except through an intermediary. And who so capable of
conciliating Wong as Annie? Wong would make her cakes even when his pigtail
hung despondently from his aching head after an opium debauch, and his
cheeks were shining with anything but gladness; for if you get drunk very often
on opium you shine.
Old Billy was mostly to be found where there was a chance of a drink; but if the
fountains were dried up, or he had been insulted by some democratic,
revolutionary, king-hating miner knocking his high hat down over his eyes, he
usually went up to Mr. Colborn's place, and sat on the fence, or on a log outside
the gate. So he was often very melancholy when Annie came out. One day his
hat was very, very badly bulged indeed.
"Your hat is very bad to-day, King Billy," said six-year-old Annie, as she stood in
front of him critically, with her head on one side. Without knowing it, the child had
come to look upon the state of the poor king's hat as emblematical of his state of
mind. When it shut up like a closed concertina his barometer was low.
