# Lawson reference set: *While the Billy Boils* (1896)

A hand-made comparison baseline for the story-to-pack pipeline, a sibling of the Jacobs set in
`../jacobs/` and the Bierce set in `../bierce/`. Claude read every scene and wrote each summary,
predicament, group and option. **No inference of any kind was used.** Compare the local-model runs
against it. Do not treat it as ground truth: it is one careful reading.

| File | What it is |
| --- | --- |
| `corpus/while-the-billy-boils.html` | Standard Ebooks single-page text (public domain) |
| `stories.json`, `chunks.json` | 52 stories and 308 scenes, cut by `../se_build.py` (the `se:short-story` markup, then the same 320-word paragraph rule as `../chunk.py`). 81,507 words; scenes run from 62 to 543 words, median 282 |
| `claude/batches/sNN.json` | per story: `{chunk, story, summary, predicament}`, the same schema as `../jacobs/claude/batches/` |
| `claude/groups_src.py` | the groups, options and per-story protagonist standing |
| `claude/build.py` | checks everything, then writes `claude/records.json` and `claude/groups.json` (unchanged from Jacobs: it resolves paths relative to itself) |
| `claude/page.py` | → `claude/REFERENCE.html`, the readable page (Jacobs' page with the title and counts changed) |

Rebuild: `python3 ../se_build.py lawson "While the Billy Boils (Henry Lawson, 1896)"` from `probe/`,
then `cd lawson/claude && python3 build.py && python3 page.py`.

## What is in it

- **308 predicaments**: one sentence each (median 22 words, min 17, max 24), written to the
  `redescribe.py` rules: no names, jobs, trades, places or story-only objects. Shearer, drover,
  swagman, selector and squatter all become generic roles (a worker, a traveller, a small holder, a
  boss, a powerful neighbour). The `topic_words` leak check flags 67 of 308. 66 are role or kin
  words (wife, boss, mother, father, neighbour, newcomer, son, brother, sweetheart, visitor, lodger,
  tenant, host), kept on purpose because the design's cast is roles. The other one is "makes room
  for" in scene 0, an idiom, not a place. Ten place words (camp, table, house, street, store) were
  caught by the check and rewritten.
- **31 groups**, each a situation that recurs in **three or more stories** (8 span 3, 14 span 4, 5
  span 5, 4 span 6). Every group has at least 5 scenes, and no story supplies more than half of any
  group's members, so **all 31 pass the catalogue's recurrence rule** (at least 5 scenes, at least 3
  stories, no story over 50%). Eight groups sit exactly at the 50% limit (G03, G04, G14, G16, G17,
  G21, G22, G26), which is the thinnest margin in the set. Each scene sits in at
  most one group: **210 are assigned and 98 fit nothing that recurs**. All 52 stories feed at least
  one group.
- **Options**: 3 to 5 per group, 142 in all (18 groups have 5, 13 have 4). 118 come from what
  someone in a scene did or refused to do (`scene:N`), 12 are archetypes and 12 fill gaps. **14
  scene options cite a scene outside their own group.** That is looser than DESIGN.md's "drawn from
  other scenes in the cluster", and `groups.json` marks each one `in_group: false`. As in Bierce,
  most are the scene just before or after a member, where the character acts (scene 22 hobbles the
  pursuit that scene 23 escapes; scene 30 is the rescue scene 29 sets up).
- **Moves**: spine paths with a direction only (`+`, `-`, `risk`, `set`). There are no magnitudes,
  as the design requires. `money` is moved 63 times and `standing` 51, the two skills 43 times
  between them, and relationships 123 times. Relationship roles are generic and mostly working ones:
  `family`, `mate` (one friend), `mates` (the crew or your side), `boss`, `creditor`, `stranger`,
  `authority`, `sweetheart`, `crew`, `butt`, `child`, `rival`. Flags record what the player did:
  `did_a_flit`, `worked_sick`, `pilfered`, `informer`, `on_the_spree`, `worked_a_mark`,
  `went_away`, `moved_on`, `fought_for_mate`.
- **Skills** proposed for this corpus: `grit`, for enduring hardship and holding on when it would be
  easier to give up, and `nous`, for the practical wit of getting by, getting round and getting fed.
  Jacobs' `cunning` and Bierce's `nerve` do not fit: Lawson's people are rarely afraid and seldom
  scheming, but they are always tired and usually short of a meal.
- **Stage** comes from protagonist standing, judged **per story, not per scene**, in `STANDING` in
  `groups_src.py`. 46 of the 52 stories rank low: swagmen, shearers, selectors, fossickers, the
  unemployed and the city poor. Five rank middle (a man back from prospering abroad, the narrator
  travelling on his own account, a settled householder, and two men long in the city). Only the
  squatter of *Baldy Thompson* ranks high. **So every one of the 31 groups comes out stage `low`.**
  That is the book, not a flaw in the grouping, but it means this corpus alone cannot fill the upper
  stages of a pack. Stage for Lawson would have to come from something other than standing, for
  example the size of the stake, or be supplied by a second corpus.

## Against the catalogue (v2, 82 entries)

**Ten groups match an existing entry closely:** G03 a mate always one move ahead of you
(`outmatched`, with `used` for the mate who lets you carry the risk), G05 someone worse off than you
(`plea_for_help`, the asked side, though here nobody has to ask), G17 keeping up appearances while
broke (`pretence`), G20 talking a kind host out of a free feed (`used`, the user's side), G21
vouching for a stranger (`not_who_they_seem`), G24 caught out at home (`caught_out`), G27 coming
back to find it changed (`changed`), G28 the pull of the place you left (`homecoming`), G29 doing
right by the dead (`death_as_burden`) and G30 too late (`too_late`).

**Eight overlap an entry in part but put a different decision to the player:**

- G01 an old mate down on his luck leans on you: near `plea_for_help` and `unwelcome_in_home`, but the lever is the claim of old mateship, not need or nuisance.
- G02 standing by a mate nobody else will: near `against_the_verdict`, but the pull is loyalty to a mate who let himself down (a drunk, a bully, a dog), and the price is paid to the crowd.
- G08 the one who holds your living: near `bow_for_your_living`, but the boss asks for nothing personal. He just will not wait, will not raise pay, and can replace you.
- G12 going away for work, leaving people behind: near `far_from_home`, but the decision is whether to go at all.
- G16 up against a powerful man with the rules on his side: near `at_their_mercy`, but it is your holding and your living at stake, not your life.
- G18 looked down on for being poor: near `power_over_you` and `despised`, but the snob has no power over you, so the only stake is pride.
- G19 money in your pocket and the drink on offer: near `habit` and `self_betrayal`, but the drink is a shared, social pay-day choice, not a private compulsion.
- G31 passed from door to door: near `grease`, but no bribe would help. Everyone says it is not their business.

**Thirteen are new situation types**, and most of them are about work:

- **Work and its lack:** G09 no work to be had; G13 time to walk away; G11 a venture that keeps failing (the sunk-cost choice); G10 taking from those who will not miss it (pilfering and skiving, with the informer's flag).
- **Debt:** G14 owing more than you can pay, with the creditor holding your roof; G15 slipping away from what you owe (the midnight flit).
- **Mates and crews:** G04 keeping an old mateship alive at a distance; G06 the one the crew picks on (joining or stopping the joke on a workmate); G07 whose side are you on (workers against masters).
- **Home:** G22 holding the place together alone (the partner left behind while the other is away earning); G23 a young one eager to do grown-up work; G25 trifling with someone who takes it seriously; G26 a quarrel neither side will end.

**The brief's targets, one by one.** Mateship against self-interest: G01, G02, G05, G04. A boss or
squatter who holds your living: G08, G16. Work that doesn't come: G09. A wife left alone on the
selection: G22. Drink and pay-day: G19. Walking away from a job or a place: G13, with G12 for
leaving to find work. Loyalty to a mate who lets you down: G02 and G03. **A newcomer tested by
hardened hands was not found as its own recurring situation.** Lawson's newcomers (the man who
forgot, a sick new chum, the boys at the railway camp) are sheltered or humoured, not tested.
The hazing in this book falls on an insider the crew has already made its butt, which is G06.

## How this corpus differs

**It is the largest reference set so far**, 52 stories and 308 scenes, twice Bierce's story count.
But many pieces are sketches, not stories. *Hungerford*, *In a Dry Season*, *In a Wet Season*,
*Across the Straits*, *Coming Across* and *"Dossing Out" and "Camping"* are travel or social
sketches with no plot, and their landscape and asides fit nothing. But the long single stories
leave even more unassigned. *His Father's Mate* leaves 8 of 13 scenes: an abandoned goldfield, a
father's memories of a brother and a son taken by the police. *Going Blind*, *The Drover's Wife* and
*The Bush Undertaker* leave 6 each. Their middles are one-story material with no second instance.
The recurring situations come mostly from the yarns (Mitchell, Steelman, the shearers' huts) and
from the opening and closing turns of the full stories.

**One world, one class.** Every earlier corpus ranged across classes; this one stays almost wholly
with people who own nothing. So `money` does real work in the moves, which it barely did in Bierce,
and nearly every group turns on a small sum: a shilling for beer, a week's board, the price of a
steerage ticket. The recurring pressures are material ones, like the season's work, the creditor
and the boss. Few are of the heart. That makes it the closest corpus yet to the Frontier setting,
and its predicaments transplant well. "Your living depends on someone who will not wait" and
"you could slip away before the one you owe can stop you" read as naturally in an office or a
freight yard as in a shearing shed.

**Recurring characters cross story boundaries.** Mitchell narrates, stars in or is named in about
a dozen pieces, and Steelman and Smith in three. Macquarie, Stiffner, Arvie Aspinall and his
mother, and Jimmy Nowlett each appear in three or four. A group spanning three stories is therefore sometimes one
character's habit seen three times. G03, the sharp mate, draws on two Steelman stories, and G20, the
con, on two. The grouping counts stories, not characters, as the recurrence rule does, but a tool
that grouped by character would find some of these groups for the wrong reason.

**Comic and bleak halves share situations.** G29 doing right by the dead holds the union's
half-drunk funeral for a stranger, the child's burial at *Golden Gully*, a shepherd tipsily burying
his old mate, and a street boy's condolence visit. G15 the flit holds the farce of the nail in the
publican's boot and a widow's move by night past a policeman who looks the other way. A tool that
grouped by mood would split both.

## Known defects

- Scene 120 repeats a whole paragraph of Mitchell's speech, and scene 190 repeats the narrator's
  paragraph about his city rig. Both repeats are in the text as split. They are left alone, so that
  `chunks.json` stays the corpus as split.
- Scene 0's predicament contains "room" as an idiom ("makes room for a past"), which the
  `topic_words` check counts as a place word.
- Standing is almost uniform (see Stage above), so the stage field in `groups.json` carries no
  information for this corpus.