While The Billy BoilsSearchCome all of you assembled here,Just listen for awhile,I’ll give you my adventures now,At which I know you’ll smile.In the colony I’ve just arrived,My togs, I know, look rum;And you can see with half an eye,That I’m a green new chum.
I came out here, like many more,To pick up lots of gold;If I greas’d my boots ’twould stick to them,At home I had been told;But deuce a nugget could I find,When up here I had come;And now 1 see that I have been,A deluded, green new chum.
I went and bought a shovel,And a thundering heavy pick,The eye of it, I’m confident,Was full four inches thick.Two diggers then were passing by,One pointed with his thumb;And said, “Lor, Bill, just twig his tools,There goes a green new chum.”
The first hole that I ever sunk,Was there on Fiery Creek;And as it run full ten feet deep,It took me just a week.When on the bottom I fell through,Which made me look quite glum;I’d sunk on a tremendous drive,Wasn’t I a green new chum?
Two diggers working close by me,Said they were going to town,And asked me if I’d buy their hole,And begged me to go down.They scraped up nuggets with a knife,The sight quite struck me dumb;I gave an ounce and a half for it,Like a foolish, green new chum.
Next morning I well fossicked it,And washed the bottom out;The tub turned out a pennyweight,And I began to doubt.Of course you know they’d peppered it,The gold was all a hum;They’d sold it me because they sawI was a green new chum.
I see you all enjoy the joke,And at me loudly laugh;But now you know I’m used to it,And can stand a deal of chaff.But there’s a cove that’s grinning thereWhen he ought to be quite dumb;I’m sure he needn’t laugh at me,He’s another green new chum.