While the Billy Boils

While the Billy Boils by Henry Lawson is about a family friend, a jolly old man named Billy. Excerpt: "You remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hats, as «An old mate of your father's on the diggings, Johnny.» And he would pat our heads and say we were fine boys, or girls—as the case may have been—and that we had our father's nose but our mother's eyes, or the other way about; and say that the baby was the dead spit of its mother, and then added, for father's benefit: «But yet he's like you, Tom.»