Now then, don't interrupt--let me have the floor.

You're going to save the government a deal of hauling, but that's nothing; your ticket is by Ballarat, and it isn't good over that twelve miles, and so----" "But why should the government care which way I go ?" "Goodness knows! Ask of the winds that far away with fragments strewed the sea, as the boy that stood on the burning deck used to say.

The government chooses to do its railway business in its own way, and it doesn't know as much about it as the French.

In the beginning they tried idiots; then they imported the French--which was going backwards, you see; now it runs the roads itself--which is going backwards again, you see.

Why, do you know, in order to curry favor with the voters, the government puts down a road wherever anybody wants it--anybody that owns two sheep and a dog; and by consequence we've got, in the colony of Victoria, 800 railway stations, and the business done at eighty of them doesn't foot up twenty shillings a week." "Five dollars?
Oh, come!" "It's true.