He reached the goldfields, dug without success, and would have starved but for his fiddle.

A year found him back in Melbourne, penniless.

Here he met another German in the same condition.

They decided to work their way overland to Sydney, Hans playing the fiddle and his mate singing.

Then began a Bohemian life of music by the wayside inns, sleep in the open air, and meals when it pleased God to send them.
This had proved to be the solitary sunlit passage in his life, for when he reached Sydney he found that his music had no money value, and, under the goad of hunger, took to the trade that he had learned so unwillingly.