The Half-way House at Tinned Dog (Out-Back in Australia) kept Daniel Myers -- licensed to retail spirituous and fermented liquors -- in drink and the horrors for upward of five years, at the end of which time he lay hidden for weeks in a back skillion, an object which no decent man would care to see -- or hear when it gave forth sound. 'Good accommodation for man and beast'; but few shanties save his own might, for a consideration, have accommodated the sort of beast which the man Myers had become towards the end of his career. But at last the eccentric Bush doctor, 'Doc' Wild' (who perhaps could drink as much as Myers without its having any further effect upon his temperament than to keep him awake and cynical), pronounced the publican dead enough to be buried legally; so the widow buried him, had the skillion cleaned out, and the sign altered to read, 'Margaret Myers, licensed, &c. ', and continued to conduct the pub.
just as she had run it for over five years, with the joyful and blessed exception that there was no longer a human pig and pigstye attached, and that the atmosphere was calm. Most of the regular patrons of the Half-way House could have their horrors decently, and, comparatively, quietly -- or otherwise have them privately -- in the Big Scrub adjacent; but Myers had not been one of that sort.
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