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"So 'twas for a year or two, till the practice-camp was put up on Wydcombe Down. I mind that summer well, for 'twere a fearful hot one, and Joey Garland and me taught ourselves to swim in the sheep-wash down in Mayo's Meads. And there was the white tents all up the hillside, and the brass band a-playing in the evenings before the officers' dinner-tent.
Culp's peculiar process begins; and this I prefer to describe to you as nearly as I can in his own words. He said that tobacco had long been grown in California even before the Americans came. He had raised it as a crop for fifteen years; and before he perfected his new process, he was able usually to select the best of his crop for smoking-tobacco, and sold the remainder for sheep-wash.
One year two millions of pounds were raised in the State, and, as it was mostly sold for sheep-wash, it lasted several years, and discouraged the growers. Tobacco always grew readily, but it was too rank and strong. They used Eastern methods, topping and suckering, and as the plant had here a very long season to grow and mature, the leaf was thick and very strong.
But for many years the product was rank, coarse, and fitter for sheep-wash than for any other purpose. Meantime, however, not a few men familiar with the old processes of raising and curing the plant have tried their best ingenuity to improve the quality.
Sam'l took him up bodily and carried him down the slope to the Wastrel, shaking him gently as he went. Across the stream he put him on his feet. "If I catches yo' cadgerin' aroun' the farm agin, little mon," he admonished, holding up a warning finger; "I'll tak' yo' and drap yo' in t' Sheep-wash, I warn yo' fair. I'd ha' done it noo an' yo'd bin a bigger and a younger mon.
The principal gullies about Bendigo are Sailors's, Napoleon, Pennyweight, Peg Leg, Growler's, White Horse, Eagle Hawk, Californian, American, Derwent, Long, Picaninny, Iron Bark, Black Man's, Poor Man's, Dusty, Jim Crow, Spring, and Golden also Sydney Flat, and Specimen Hill Haverton Gully, and the Sheep-wash.
So they three went off through the summer's day as happy as though all life were one great summer's holiday, and there were no storms below the horizon to rise and overwhelm them; through the grassy flat, where the quail whirred before them, and dropped again as if shot; across the low rolling forest land, where a million parrots fled whistling to and fro, like jewels, in the sun; past the old stockyard, past the sheep-wash hut, and then through forest which grew each moment more dense and lofty, along the faint and narrow track which led into one of the most abrupt and romantic gullies which pierce the Australian Alps.
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