Title: Rigby's Romance
Author: Joseph Furphy
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Language: English
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Rigby's Romance

by

Joseph Furphy

I am a humble actor, doom'd to play
A part obscure, and then to glide away;
Incurious how the great or happy shine.
Or who have parts obscure and sad as mine.

--Rev. George Crabbe.

WHILST conveying my own unobtrusive individuality into Echuca on a pleasant evening in the April of '84, I had little thought of the delicate web of heart history which would be unfolded for my edification on the morrow. My mind was running rather upon the desirableness of a whole bag of chaff for my two horses; a satisfying feed for my kangaroo dog (which is implying more than most people wot of); and a good sleep for myself. I would have been prepared to aver that I was merely bound for Yarrawonga, via Echuca, on business of my own; whereas the smoothly--running Order of Things had already told me off as eye-witness and chronicler of a touching interlude--a love passage such as can befall only once in that one life which is each person's scanty dividend at the hand of Time.

Making straight for my customary place of sojourn--namely, Mrs. Ferguson's Coffee Palace--I helped the landlady's husband to unsaddle and feed my horses; after which, I caused that unassuming bondman to bring about twenty lbs. of scraps for Pup, whilst I chained him (Pup, of course) in an empty stall. Then, with six or eight words of explanation and apology to Mrs. Ferguson, I sought my usual bedroom, and, shedding all my garments but one, threw myself into collision with that article of furniture which has proved fatal to some better men, and to a great many worse.

Here an opportune intermission of about ten hours in the march of events affords convenience for explaining the purpose of my journey to Yarrawonga. The fact is that I object to being regarded as a mere romancist, even as a dead-head speculator, or dilettante reporter, of the drama of life. You must take me as a hard-working and ordinary actor on this great stage of fools; but one who, nevertheless, finds a wholesome recreation in observing the parts played by his fellow-hypocrites. (The Greek "hupokrisis," I find, signifies, indifferently, "actor" and "hypocrite.")

I was booked for one of those soft things that sometimes light on us as gratefully and as unaccountably as the wholesale rain from heaven upon the mallee beneath. John C. Spooner, Rory O'Halloran and I had just bought the Goolumbulla brand. Or rather, the manager, Mr. Spanker, had given us the clearing of the run under certain conditions, one of which was the payment of £100.

Goolumbulla--centrally-situated in that wilderness between the Willandra and the Darling--had been settled for about five years. Six hundred head of cattle had originally been placed on the run, to the disgust and exasperation of Mr. Spanker, whose bigoted faith in the evil-smelling merino admitted no toleration for any other kind of stock. His antipathy was reasonable enough in this instance, for these were warrigals, even as scrub-bred cattle go. You know the class--long-bodied, clean-flanked, hard-muscled, ardent-eyed, and always in the same advanced-store condition. They had been wild enough when first brought from the ranges of the Upper Lachlan, and Goolumbulla was just the sort of country to accelerate their reversion to the pre-domesticated type. At the time I speak of, they could barely endure the sight of a man on horseback. As for a man on foot, they would face anything else on earth to get away from him; and if they couldn't get away, that man might either betake himself to his faith, or stand on guard. Which latter alternative sounds so dishonestly vague and non-committal that literary self-respect demands a slight digression.

To deal with fear-maddened cattle in confined spaces--as in drafting or trucking--the infantry man requires an alert eye, a cool head, and a suitable stem of scrub, terminating in a nasty spray of leafless twigs; also his flank and rear must be covered, in order to confine the enemy to a frontal assault. These conditions being fulfilled, the operator can reserve his mortal preparation for some future emergency, though it would, perhaps, be as well to abstain from anything in the nature of language until the draft is put through. A handy piece of brush, judicially presented, will check the charge of any steer. The animal will try to get round the obstruction, but he won't attempt to break through.

Here, by the way, I may seize an opportunity of further disturbing the congested ignorance of the bookish public by noticing Sir Walter Scott's misapprehension of the bovine temperament, as displayed in "The Lady of the Lake." You remember how the milk-white bull--"choicest of the prey we had, when swept our merry men Gallangad"--is depicted as fiery-eyed, fierce, tameless and fleet, to begin with.

"But steep and flinty was the road.
And sharp the hurrying pikemen's goad;
And when we came to Dennan's Row.
A child might scatheless stroke his brow."

Stockman will conclude either that the child would be an accomplished matador in disguise, or that Scotch cattle have some peculiar way of reasoning out a new situation.

Nor did the Goolumbulla brand entertain any Scotch idea respecting the advantageousness of southward emigration. A draft, started for Victoria, was like a legion of evil spirits evicted from their haunt. As they went through dry places, seeking rest and finding none, the frenzy of nostalgia, or home-sickness, aggravated by chronic insomnia, made them harder to hold than quicksilver. Their camp was liable to spontaneous eruption at any hour of the night; and then it would be as easy to steady a cyclone as to ring the scattered torrent which swept through the scrub, like a charge of duck-shot through a wire fence.

Drovers of superhuman ability and profane address had at different times taken away three drafts; but none of these professors had ever besieged the station for a second contract. Indeed, the last drover, though as vigilant, as energetic, and as prayerful as any on the track, had found himself with about forty head left out of two hundred by the time he had crossed the first fifty miles. His horses being completely played out in limiting the leakage even to this proportion, he had sacked his three or four men, and had sullenly escorted the remnant of his draft back to their beloved wilderness. The absconders found their way home in batches, franked by the boundary men of intervening paddocks, who willingly made apertures in their fences to speed the parting guests.

But now Goolumbulla had changed owners; and the new firm had authorised Mr. Spanker to get rid of the cattle at any price and stock up with sheep.

One of the Goolumbulla boundary riders was an old friend of mine. This Rory O'Halloran--better known as Dan O'Connell--was a married man. By nature dreamy, sensitive and affectionate, the poor fellow had a few months previously sustained a blow which left him in a trance of misery. His only child--a fine little girl five or six years old--had got lost in the scrub, and had been found too late. Rory had settled down patiently and submissively to his routine work again, but the memories and associations of his home, though precious while the sense of bereavement was fresh, had in time become intolerable. For such afflictions as his, there is no nepenthe, and the only palliative is strenuous action.

Hence Rory's nature, recoiling in unconscious self-defence from the congealing desolations of Memory, craved such hardship and distraction as would be limited only by physical endurance. And instinctively perceiving that the Goolumbulla cattle were quite competent to meet his requirements, he had talked the matter over with Mr. Spanker, and provisionally engaged to buy the brand for £100. He proposed me as an associate. Spanker, in seconding the motion, suggested John C. Spooner, professional drover, as a third co-operator. Seconded, in turn, by Rory, and carried on the voices. The station stockkeeper had then been approached on the subject, but he washed his hands of the whole business. He darkly predicted calamity to the enterprise and insolvency to the station, as a consequence of such "blanky, flamin', jump-up greed for a bit of wool."

Then followed hasty and copious correspondence between Rory, Spooner, and myself. Everything went without a hitch. The preliminaries were soon arranged. For my own part, not being blessed by Nature with the saving grace of thrift ("saving grace" is good), I had no cash reserve. Spooner was in a similar state of sin, for, in spite of his almost insulting efficiency, he was constitutionally unfortunate. But Rory had about £300 in the bank at Hay, and he was prepared to finance the undertaking.

The arrangement was this: Spooner was to enclose with a strong wire fence each tank from which the cattle were accustomed to drink, leaving the lower wire high enough to admit sheep. An open gateway would be left in each fence until everything was ready. Then the gaps would be closed, and the cattle, shut out from water, would hang round the tanks, tailed and humored by our party, till the whole brand was collected. Meanwhile, the three of us would jointly sign a bond for the £100--which, by the way, was merely a nominal price for the draft, and immediately make a start. The poor dumb beasts would certainly be thirsty to begin with, but this was nothing when you consider how much worse they would be by the time they reached the next available water.

No one had any clear notion of how many head might be collected, but we counted on something over four hundred--possibly up to five hundred and fifty, including calves and cleanskins. We intended to take them across the Murray, and dispose of them in handy lots at the agricultural fairs in northern Victoria, thus passing the trouble on a little farther.

But this was prospective. For the present, it had been arranged that Rory should meet Spooner and myself at Hay, on the next Sunday but one. Another week would take the three of us to Goolumbulla, with three or four hired men, and ten or twelve decent horses. Then, if we could not command success, we could do more, Sempronius, we would deserve it.

Again, we might fairly count upon favourable conditions. The route was familiar to Spooner and myself; there would be no disturbing moonlight for the first week or so; and we might expect reasonably cool weather. The trip to the Victorian border would be only about three hundred and fifty miles. So everything was propitious.

My own immediate business was to be at Yarrawonga on a certain day, there to take delivery of three horses, already purchased by Spooner with Rory's money; then I had to turn up at Hay on the Sunday above referred to. Meanwhile, Spooner, with a few more horses, would be converging from his native town of Wagga.

Of course, these details are nothing to do with my record; they are presented merely as a spontaneous evidence and guarantee of that fidelity to fact which I acquired early in life, per medium of an old stirrup leather, kept for the purpose.

Chapter I.

I wol you tell a litel thing in prose.
That oughte liken you, as I suppose.
Or elles certes ye be to dangerous.
It is a moral tale vertuous.
Al be it told sometimes in sondry wise.
Of sondry folk, as I shall you devise.

--Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

JUST as a bale of wool is dumped, by hydraulic pressure, to less than half its normal size, I scientifically compressed something like twenty-four hours' sleep into the interval between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. Then a touch of what you call dyspepsia and I call laziness, kept me debating with myself for another swift-running hour. So it was getting on for nine o'clock when I sat down to breakfast with Mrs. Ferguson, the two servant girls, and the husband already glanced at. All the boarders had by this time dispersed for the forenoon.

However, scene and association presently recalled former companionship; and I varied the usual breakfast-table gossip by asking:

"Have you seen the Colonel lately, Mrs. Ferguson?"

"Not since a fortnight after the last time you were here; it's nine weeks to-day, and the other'll be seven weeks come Friday. There were two ladies here inquiring for him yesterday afternoon. One of them had a dark maroon, and a sailor hat trimmed with the same color; and the other had the new shade of brown, and a new tuscan with three black feathers. They wanted to know his address."

"Badly, no doubt. Had they little Johnny with them?"

"Go way. Well, I had just re-posted two letters that had come. They were both office envelopes; one of them was from Waghorn Brothers, who he was with three or four years ago fixing up them wire binders, and the other was from the agent he's with now. Most likely they want him again."

"Quite likely they do."

"That'll be it, then. But I wonder what they wanted him for. They were both strangers to me, and when they found I knew Mr. Rigby so well, I got them to come in and sit down in the front room in the cool. They were very quiet-mannered and nice-spoken (I don't care what you say). They said they might call again before they left, and the one with the brown dress gave me her card. What did you do with it, Louisa?"

"Annie had it after me."

"It's gone," said Annie laconically. "That cardbasket's piled up; and I s'pose it got blown on the floor. Anyhow, I found Bibblims sitting under the front room table, eating it."

Bibblims was the baby.

"Do you remember what the name was?" asked Mrs. Ferguson.

"It's on the tip of my tongue," replied Annie. "Something like 'Tasmania.'"

"Tasman," I suggested, incredulously.

"No," replied the girl, "it was a long name."

"And where is Rigby now?" I asked.

"Why, he's at Yooringa, of course," replied Mrs. Ferguson. "Maginnis (late Waterton), Farmers' Arms, Yooringa."

"Just a nice stage for me to-day," I remarked; "and there's sure to be grass in Cameron's Bend. I'm going to Yarrawonga, and I'll take this side of the river. What is Rigby doing now? I thought he was running the vertical at Hawkins' mill."

"Only till they got properly going," replied the inspired woman. "He's taking pictures and writing for them American people now. He got started nine weeks ago. It's for a big book, all in volumes, on farming, and dairying, and vines, and fruit trees, and one thing or another, in different parts of the world. They've kept him on a string longer than they'd keep me, anyway. It's five months ago since he was engaged, and not so much as 'thanky' till he got orders to start in a hurry. It was the American Consult who recommended him; and well he might, for there's very few things that would take Mr. Rigby at a short."

"I'll be pretty sure to meet him at Waterton's, then?"

"Maginnis (late Waterton), Farmers' Arms, Yooringa. He'll be there to--day; and he won't be leaving till next Monday at the inside."

"Well, I think I'll be going now, Mrs. Ferguson. I'll just settle up with you, so as not to keep the horses saddled."

"Oh, Ferguson'll saddle them." That unobtrusive, but useful person hastily finished his coffee and glided from the room. "Just rest yourself while you can. I'm afraid you'll have a dusty day for travelling," and so the frivolous conversation went on till I shook hands with the three women, gave the two children a threepenny bit each, wrung Mr. Ferguson's hand in silent condolence, and took the track.

As I rode eastward across the town, followed by my pack-horses and kangaroo dog, the postman intercepted me.

"Morning, Collins. Jefferson Rigby's a friend of yours, ain't he? Any idea where he is?"

"Up the river, I believe--so Mrs. Ferguson tells me. I expect to see him to-night."

"Couple of ladies came to the post-office yesterday hunting him up. We sent them to Mrs. Ferguson. So they'll be right. Horses looking a bit hairy on it."

"Season's telling on them."

"Grand dog."

"Middling."

"So long."

"So long."

Chapter II.

One azure-eyed and mild.
With hair like the burst of morn.
And one with raven tresses.
And looks that scorch'd with scorn.
But yet with gleams of pity
To comfort the forlorn.

--Charles Mackay.

I WENT on, following the road up the river. I had cantered a mile, or better, and was hardening my horses with a long walk, when a buggy and pair overtook and passed me. Though grappling at the time with an exceedingly subtle metaphysical problem, I casually noticed that the driver was a boy of sixteen or seventeen wool seasons, and that there were two women in the buggy; a thinnish one sitting beside the boy, and a fatter one on the back seat, each sheltering from the blazing sun with her umbrella. The buggy went on its way.

My next spell of cantering took me past the vehicle, and my next spell of walking brought the vehicle past me again. This occurred time after time; it occurred till I was sick of it; and, when we had left Echuca twenty miles behind, it was occurring worse than ever. I had tried putting on more pace, and I had tried slacking off, but each expedient seemed equally to aggravate the evil, though the buggy horses kept up the same slow, uniform, slinging trot. Other travellers overtook and passed us, and were as though they had not been. We overtook and passed others, who similarly sank into oblivion. But we couldn't get rid of one another. Each time we passed I looked sternly ahead, and the women occulted their faces with their umbrellas, for the thing was becoming intolerable. I felt as if I were dogging them with some sinister purpose, and they obviously felt like people driven by the mere stress of circumstances into immodest conspicuousness.

My whole day's journey was thirty-odd miles, and I had intended doing it in one stage, but now altered my plan on account of that buggy. On reaching a place where the track branched, to unite about a mile ahead, I watched the boy diverge to the left, then I quietly dodged off to the right. Half a mile further on I stopped, pulled the pack-saddle off Bun-yip, and tied both horses in a good shade. Then I spent half-an-hour in carefully dredging Pup all over with insecticide, and another half-hour in the interminable work of carving a stock-whip handle. Having thus given the other party a fair start I resumed my way.

Passing the intersection of the tracks a few minutes later I saw the buggy standing in the shade of a tree, the boy taking the nosebags off the horses and the women putting things under the seats. They had been stopping for lunch, probably with a view to getting rid of me. Then I perceived that there must be something in it, and so resolved to let things take their course. I have seen too much of life to persist in shafting against destiny.

Still looking haughtily ahead, I passed at a walk within three yards of the party. The boy was now in his post of honor, keeping the buggy on the off lock. One of the women was taking her place beside him, while the other stood by, holding both umbrellas; then the latter climbed into the back seat. I had opportunity to notice that the first woman was tall, straight, and symmetrical, though rather spare than slight; and that her hair was of a glossy, changeable brown. The other showed large and Juno-like, black haired, fairly handsome, but by no means young; and I was further privileged to observe that a good deal of her had been turned down over the anvil.

By the foot, American, thought I, as my politely restricted arc of vision left the party behind--and you'll see by-and-bye how infallible that rule is. In fact, the foot of the American woman is a badge as distinctive as the moustache of the Australienne. However, there was a good expression in the foot now under notice; it was a generous, loyal, judicious foot, yet replete with idealism and soulfulness; wherefore, I became at once prepossessed in favor of the owner.

In a few minutes the buggy overtook me for about the fifteenth time, and the boy pulled up to the walking pace of my horses.

"Say, boss," he inquired, "do you know where Maginnis' Farmers' Arms is, if it's a fair question?"

"Yes, straight ahead."

"How fur?"

"Twelve or fifteen miles. That's where I'm bound for."

"Grand dog you got there."

"Fair."

"Not a bad style o' moke you're ridin'."

"Decent. He does me for poking about."

"Could you tell us what kind of place this hotel is?" asked the light--brown hair. "Are the people likely to have accommodation for us to--night?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, ma'am," I replied, "the house was nothing to boast of in Waterton's time. Grog business, pure and simple. The hotel itself would be no disgrace to Echuca; but the management, as I knew it, was not good; it was but so-so; and so-so is not good, it is but so-so. I trust it may be better now, though there are more promising names than Maginnis. I think I'd as soon chance Flanagan."

Both women smiled amusedly, but a perturbed expression soon gathered on the face of the brown-haired one. Whilst replying to her question, I had taken note of thoughtful, pure-grey eyes, a faultless nose (which is saying a lot), and a mouth of ideal perfection; altogether, a face of more than common beauty, but of such exceeding loveliness as to disarm criticism. A face with a history, so I immediately snapshotted it on a blank spot in my memory, with a view to working out the biography at some future time. I could get her name from the boy in the evening, and no other factor would be required.

Close ahead of us was a farm-house on the right-hand side of the road. A few full-grown cattle were in the stockyard; the portly agriculturist was there himself, ordering some boys about; and a long-legged, slow-moving man with a Robinson-Crusoe beard, was arranging a roping-pole. A bright chestnut horse, saddled and bridled, was hitched to the fence close by. It is easy to be mistaken in the identity of a man, but the horse is always a certainty.

"I'll likely overtake you again in a few minutes," said I to the boy, as I turned Cleopatra, and crossed the road to the fence. "At it again, Steve?" I called out. Steve laid down the roping-pole, and mounted his horse to ride the fifty yards.

"You gave me a start," said he, as we shook hands across the fence. "I'm busy now; but you had better stop with us to-night. We're camped in Cameron's Bend, down from Waterton's pub. Dixon's with me. I've bought a pair of steers from this cove, and we're going to couple them now, and let them civilise themselves in his paddock for a day or two. Save any chance of them sulking in yoke."

"Well, I won't keep you, Steve. Did you see Jeff Rigby at Waterton's?"

"No. Haven't seen him for five or six seasons."

"Well, we'll be able to hold a meeting to-night, with the Major in the chair. Now go back to your vile occupation."

When I overtook the buggy again, I was as jocund as a seeker after wisdom may permit himself to be.

"An old school mate of mine," I remarked graciously, as the three looked round toward me. "Steve Thompson, I've known him since we were each about as high as that middle rail. One of the straightest men in the country--though he's supposed to have a curse on him through a dubious transaction of ten or twelve years ago. He was owing fifty notes to a man that got lost in a shipwreck on the coast of New Zealand, and Steve failed to chase his friend with the money till the whole transaction adjusted itself at that, leaving a curse on Steve. I had little thought of meeting him to--day--thought he was a couple of hundred miles north. I was looking forward to meeting another very old friend, Jeff Rigby, a striking contrast to Thompson in many ways; the most conspicuous point about him being that he allows nobody to know anything except what he tells." The sentence seemed to die out to nothing; partly because it was impossible to finish the last clause without a solecism, but more particularly because I noticed both women's eyes fixed on my face, with a disconcerting interest in the casual gossip. It is humiliating when you feel yourself expected to say something good, and a swift reconnaissance of the subject shows you no opening for anything beyond what a nobleman might drivel. Moreover, I was fresh from the pastoral regions, where etiquette demands frank, unsolicited, and copious comment on the merits or demerits of some absent person; whereas these women were evidently civilised, and consequently regarded my conventional remarks as the exordium of some good anecdote. I therefore gave my earnest attention for a few moments to a mare and a foal, standing in the shade of a tree close by.

Chapter III.

A still, sweet, placid, moonlight face.
And slightly nonchalant.
Which seems to claim a middle place
Between one's love and aunt.

--O. W. Holmes.

"PARDON my question," said the brown hair hesitatingly. She paused a moment, then asked: "What countryman is your friend?"

"Australian, madam; born near Geelong. His parents are English."

"Are you sure?" she faltered, while the color faded from her face.

"Perfectly sure, madam. I'm as certain of his nationality as of my own."

Then twenty or thirty seconds heaped twenty or thirty years on that's girl's head. I hadn't noticed the faint wrinkles about her eyes till now, but, riding close to her, and looking at her with puzzled sympathy, I marked not only these footprints of the crows of Time, but here and there a silver thread imparting unsought dignity to the beauty of her sun-bright hair. And lapsing into my deplorable Hamlet mood I began to calculate her age.

Ay, poor post-meridian! Under the searching analysis of some mental confluent, the beauty was dissolving from her face, yet leaving the loveliness intact. Enhanced, heightened rather, by unspoken kinship in liability to the tyranny of Time--that pathetic kinship which, clothed in poet's words carries more tenderness than any other touch of nature. There is one grace of the rosebud; another grace of the expanded blossom; and, to the enlightened mind, a more adorable grace in the fading flower, which gains in fragrance as it loses in freshness.

When we liken women to glass--as we often do--the parallel rests on fragility, on restorableness, on refractiveness, or some such property. But there is a more touching similitude yet. Of all known glass the most lovely is a collection exhumed some forty years ago at Idalium in Cyprus. Science becomes Poetry in mere contemplation of these relics. Take some excerpts from a description in Knight's "Dictionary of Mechanics":--"Tints, positively outside of all experience, confuse the most accurate observation...marbled with hues like those of incandesence...sending light, pearly hints of variegated radiance from elusive depths fantastically pied with scales of iridescence on strong original coloration...defeating all sense of strict estimation and cheating the mind with the notion of a possible perfection...as if Turner had painted skies on them in his maddest mood, and had been allowed to use flames for colors... The general effect seems to suggest that all the sunsets that have glimmered over Cyprus since those vessels were lost on the earth had sunk into their hiding-place and permeated their substance."

The glass is perishing. Matchless, indescribable, inimitable in its beauty, yet it is a loveliness that comes only with decline, a passive response to the first tender touch of that inexorable hand which brings man and all his works to dust.

I wish I could stay to moralise on this, because our appreciation of women is a subject that seems to invite disentanglement and exposition. But knowing my own proneness to wander aside, plucking fruits of philosophy, I shall, for once, guard against disgression and confine myself to clean-cut narrative.

Two widely-divergent views of women are illustrated--one in "The Gowden Locks of Anna," by Burns, the other in Moore's exquisite paraphrase of St. Jerome "Who is the Maid?" The former paints the inherent sex-charm of Creation's fairest type; the latter pictures her attained sex-value. The former conveys passion; the latter, adoration. The former sees femininity; the latter, womanhood. And these are the two extremes.

The relative potency of these diverse influences depend, of course, upon the receptivity, sensuous or psychical, of the person subjected to their agency, yet it is worthy of note that, where controlling masculine minds are moved or biassed by sex-influence, the force is exercised by a woman, not by a female. And not till the peach-bloom of youth is gone can the woman dominate the female and her personality reach its maximum angel--loveliness or its most formidable devil-beauty. None but Kadijah, fifteen years his senior, could captivate the stormy soul of the Arabian prophet. Also, if the mature Josephine Beauharnais had cared for the Faubourg St. Antoine as she cared for the Faubourg St. Germain, Bonaparte might have been the brightest name in modern history; but we know in which direction her strong allurement led, and we know how he followed it to perdition. These instances, though multiplied by ten figures, could prove nothing; nevertheless, they exemplify how the world is swayed by women, not by females. And each man, be he king or beggar, is a little world of his own. If he be swayed by a female, as kings and beggars frequently are, he is an extremely little world.

But don't misapprehend me as identifying or confounding femininity with youth, and womanhood with maturity. Just as many a man, having outlived the boy's enthusiasm and ingenuousness, retains the boy's uselessness and self-conceit, so in the other sex, mere femininity too often accompanies maturity. When this occurs--in fact, when the case is one of incorrigible femininity--the subject is good for two things only: to suckle fools and chronicle small beer.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said the deliberate voice of the woman on the back seat, "were you speaking of Mr. Rigby, or of the other gentleman?"

"I was speaking of Thompson, madam. Rigby is an American. He came out here--let's see--just when Dunolly broke out; and our acquaintance began immediately after. Of the many friends he has made, my father, I think, holds priority in date, and I take precedence in intimacy."

My reply was, of course, addressed to the black hair, who had asked the question. Glancing then at the other, and perceiving that she had renewed her youth like the eagle, I thought to while away a few minutes by remarking, in my dry way, that Echuca was just then in a state of hungry curiosity touching two ladies who had been making inquiries after the very person under discussion.

"Speaking of Rigby," said I, "it was only this morning that I was a little amused by"--here, with a sudden flash of intuition, I loosely and tentatively identified my auditors with the mysterious scouts; whereupon, figuratively speaking, I flogged my tongue unmercifully, then gave it its head, and heard it continue in the same breath--"remembering what a hero he seemed to me in the days when the earth was young. I like to consider myself a Melchisedec in philosophy; but the conviction is often forced upon me that, in many ways, I have been a mere disciple of the Colonel's. In fact, we differ only on points where he's grimly and disagreeably right, and I'm comfortably wrong. I wouldn't take £100 a year and be as conscientious as he is. For instance, I'm a Conservative; and he is--well, not to mince matters, he's a State Socialist. In other words, I adapt myself to the times and the seasons, whilst he thinks the conformity ought to be on the other side." Rather disconnected, and altogether rudely confidential, but not bad for a desperate impromptu. And the women, refined as they evidently were, listened as to the voice of a clergyman.

"What is Mr. Rigby's occupation?" asked the black hair, after a short silence.

"Second-rate photographer and descriptive writer, at present, madam. He has been a first-rate engine-driver, also mechanical expert, a third-rate journalist, and a fourth-rate builder. At various times he has ranked high up to ninth and tenth rate in something like a score of other and more menial occupations; but speaking with actuarial precision, he's a land surveyor. If there's any question of his identity, I may add that he was born at a place called Marathon, somewhere in the backblocks of New York State."

There was intense interest in the face of the brownhaired woman as I spoke, and evident relief as I concluded. Then another pause.

"This is a most happy coincidence," she said, with a frankness almost supplicatory. "Mr. Rigby and I were born less than five miles apart, and I knew him in America up to the time of his departure. Is--is he much altered since you know him?"

"A good deal, madam. The second twenty-five years of a man's life cover about two of the Seven Ages. In this instance, they have transformed the lover, sighing like the she-oak, to the mature egotist, full of wise fads and modern theories; but it would take an able reasoner to convince the Colonel that he has in any way altered for the worse. Physically, he's as strong as ever he was; he attributes this to his Puritan descent--I attribute it to my climate. For more than twenty years I have piously looked forward to the privilege of gracing him with the Earl of Morton's tribute to John Knox: 'There lies one who never feared the face of man.' But waiting is weary work, and hope deferred maketh the heart grizzle. He'll probably see me out. I fancy he'll be like Moses at the age of one hundred and twenty, his eye not dim, nor his natural force abated. He differs significantly from Moses, however, in respect of not being by any means meek above all men on the earth."

A subdued smile played over the face of the brown-haired women, leaving her eyes soft as velvet.

"He hasn't been successful?" she conjectured, almost timidly.

"Only in asserting himself, madam. Financially, he's a failure--like myself."

"He has served in your military forces?" she next suggested, with tacit apology in her voice.

I softened my negative down to a forbearing shake of the head, then perceiving a certain feminine deduction in the foolish surmise, I replied:

"You refer to the title of Colonel? The fact is that when I first knew him he seemed such an ideal Down-Easter that to deny him a title of some kind--military, naval, civil, or ecclesiastical, as the case might be--was to take from him that which not enriched me and left him poor indeed. The whole thing is merely a spontaneous concession to his nationality, carrying neither flattery nor sarcasm."

"Is he married?" asked the black hair casually.

"Oh, no," I replied. "So far from it that the incongruity of the idea amuses me."

"A woman-hater, I assume," she persisted, with uneasy boldness.

"Anything but that," I replied. "His demeanor toward women is partly paternal and partly reverential, and partly oblivious. I have always compared him with the earlier Benedick--one woman was fair, yet he was well; another was wise, yet he was well; another was virtuous, yet he was well; and if all graces had come into one woman, he would have congratulated that woman and passed on well pleased for her sake. I never met anyone else like him in this respect, but, knowing him as I do, his insusceptibility appears to me full of interest. I feel quite certain that it is owing to an early dis"--I checked myself barely in time, gave my tongue another flagellation, and heard it go on in its usual garrulous way--"cipleship of Epictetus, which had colored his whole life, endowing him with a form of selfishness that puts other people's generosity to shame."

I was in magnificent form and knew it, yet felt like a denizen of some cold country walking on thin, creaking ice. Who were these women with their reluctant forwardness and their wistful desire--tacitly expressed in tone and manner--to conciliate a mere passer-by, one whose character they could only conjecture, and of whose very name they were ignorant? Modest and cultivated they certainly were, but battling in some way with feminine inadequacy, the black hair struggling to carry off anxiety under cover of grave self-possession, the brown hair wilting under a helplessness so shrinkingly sensitive, and so sympathetically communicable that, stranger as I was, I could mentally feel her clinging to me with the mute entreaty of an ownerless dog. How did such people get through life? What business had they here? Why their interest in Rigby? Were they always like this?

"But pardon me, ladies," I resumed. "I ough to tell you that my name is Collins. In occupation, I change involuntarily, like the chameleon, according to my surroundings. At present I must stigmatise myself as a cattledrover. I'll feel very much honored if you avail yourselves of any information or assistance that it may be in my power to give!"

Whilst I was wondering whether this sounded courtly or impertinent, the brown hair bowed acknowledgment and, taking out her card case, replied with easy grace.

"Indeed, Mr. Collins, we appreciate your courtesy--Miss Artemisia Flanagan." I remembered my own rash witticism of a few minutes before, and raised my wideawake with extra solemnity. "I feel myself relying upon you already," she continued, handing me her card.

During the next minute I was a broken reed for anybody to rely upon. A good gust of wind would have toppled me off the saddle. To explain this seizure, it will be necessary to glance back along that rugged track which might have been travelled with something like comfort and profit if I had personally inherited from my forefathers a moiety of their sordid experience instead of the whole sum of their crude natural propensities.

Chapter IV.

I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love.
Make up my sum.

--"Hamlet," Act V., Scene 1.

On a summer morning, twenty-three years prior to this encounter, a Victorian ratepayer sent one of the arrows out of his quiver to muster some cows on the common, eight or ten miles from home. In the seclusion of the ranges this missile gathered as much wattle gum as he could eat; then leaving his horse to feed about with the saddle on, he lay down in the shade, and became immersed in a work of blood-and-thunder fiction, which his foresight had provided. After reading himself stupid, he took a swim in an adjacent water-hole, then basked in the sun for an hour, and finally dedicated his attention to a likely-looking place, where the age--abraded apex of a small rise showed abundance of shattered and weather--beaten quartz. This was his style of mustering cows.

Spare your scorn. The cloth-yard shaft left that rise with three specimens in his possession--one, showing a couple of colors; another, carrying a three-grain piece; and the third, a good half-penny-weight. Wearily returning home in the deepening twilight, our projectile reported the lack of success which had attended his exertions in mustering, and casually produced the specimens, which latter he had happened to notice on hastily dismounting to tighten his girth.

The ratepayer, being a man for whom digging had no fascination, just dropped a line to a young friend of opposite bent, then working a half--wages stringer on Pleasant Creek. A fortnight afterward, the digger arrived. A day or two more found the genial ratepayer, the enthusiastic digger, and the simple-minded arrow, on the spot where the latter had dismounted to tighten his girth--a spot known for years after as the Yankee Reef, and always more distinguished for promise than for fulfilment, even before the stone petered out into hungry leaders.

These details are merely introductory to the information I received from Rigby on the night we camped at the reef. We were lying, each wrapped in a blanket, around the smouldering fire. I was supposed to be asleep; in fact, I had been asleep till the sudden cry of a curlew roused me, and I found it worth my while to remain awake. For the accessories of the situation--soft summer moonlight, bush solitude, and one sympathetic auditor--had melted the Major's habitual reserve, and he was relating to my dad, in tones hoarse with emotion, the tragedy of his life. I muttered something in my sleep and rolled slowly over, face uppermost--a post hard to surpass in auricular advantages.

I soon discovered that a direful and ineffaceable quarrel with the girl of his choice had broken the poor Commodore's moorings, and left him rudderless, dismasted, derelict, at the mercy of wind and tide, and without the heart to rig anything jury. His sole consolation was in the certainty that his wrecker in ruthlessly working this havoc had marooned herself. She would never marry. She couldn't. He knew her loyal, lofty nature.

Here he stirred my depths with twenty minutes of steady panegyric, to the general effect that Miss Vanderdecken was beautiful, accomplished, gifted, amiable, beyond anything that imagination could body forth, or poet's pen turn to shape. Wherefore it warmed the very sickness of his heart to dwell on the misery she must be enduring. It was entirely her own fault. She was petulant and quarrelsome, frivolous and heartless, and the best thing that had ever happened to him was this quarrel, inasmuch as it had swept away all tawdry romance from his life, and laid bare its grand realities.

In describing this quarrel he was bitterly precise; yet I experienced disappointment, even injury, in failing to detect any blame attachable to the other party, whilst my dad's judicial mind could find no cause of misunderstanding whatsoever. But the Colonel quoted Byron, Tennyson and other excellent authorities, falling back at last on the solid though irrevelant fact that he had loved Kate too well, and it was her own sterling worthiness of that devotion which barbed the arrow that rankled in his heart. Then, again, the holy hush of Satanic tranquility (I can find no better expression) came, angel-winged, over the martyr's tempest-tossed soul, as he imagined the girl's irremediable despair.

Henceforward, however, their ways lay apart, and neither would ever know the other's fate. For the very short time that might elapse before he should shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from his world-wearied flesh, and the wattle blossom should wave above his lonely resting place, he would try to do as much good and as little harm as possible. He owed this to Kate's memory.

He had hardened himself in honor. Not one of his early friends knew whither he had drifted. He had no family obligations. His nearest relations were his step-mother and her children; and they were only too glad to see him out of the way. His sole tie to life was Kate, and when she was gone, chaos was come again.

He had looked back once, to see her standing in the doorway, with the snow-flakes falling on her head. When would that picture fade? Never!--till it dissolved with all earthly things. She was nineteen then, and he was twenty-five; she would be twenty-one now, poor Kate, and he was twenty--seven in years, but more than fifty in the iron stoicism which is bought only with blighted hopes.

And so on. Of course, I am only giving you an epitome. Yet this lugubrious ass was the sagacious, energetic, and self-reliant young citizen of the day before and the day after.

However, as twelve-year-old arrows of Australian manufacture don't notice or understand the discourse of their elders, this disclosure gave me something to ponder over in my own unsophisticated way; and thenceforward the Colonel appeared to me as one clothed in iambics, and spondees, and dactyls, and all manner of poetry. As years went on, my garnered knowledge of his life-absorbing infatuation provided a satisfactory key to his altruisms, integrity, and cynicism; and whenever the conversation of my adult associates tended to show that, in love as well as in other things, there was nothing but roguery to be found in villainous man, I had only to remember the Senator, and keep on believing.

I utilised him as an object lesson in fidelity, and it became my custom, whenever I saw him fall into reverie, to place myself, so to speak, en rapport, and thus enjoy a second-hand gloat upon the picture which I had learned to conjure up at a moment's notice--pine forests, wolves, and wigwams in the background; apple-trees, maize and pumpkins in the middle distance; and in the foreground, half-veiled by falling snow-flakes, the figure of a beautiful, though somewhat mynheer-looking sheaf of contradictions, standing in a doorway, and gazing out into the gelid desolation, whilst unavailing remorse, like a grub in the quondong, fed on her damask cheek.

In poetic keeping with his desolated life, the Judge ever afterward maintained perfect reticence respecting the unhappy stroke that his youth suffered. I have always been willing to acquire information and would therefore have welcomed his confidence at any time; but as he chose to keep the burden to himself, I had to content myself with the scrap I had picked up, remembering that all things come to him who philosophises.

At last the potato was cooked. The cryptic passage found its Rosetta stone in the card presented by the brown-haired woman, for the name thereon was "Miss Kate Vanderdecken." Also, the fate which had so sternly insisted on a conference between us was satisfactorily accounted for. Things will occasionally happen of themselves.

Chapter V.

Gabriel was not forgotten. Within her heart was his image.
Clothed in the beauty of love and youth, as last she beheld him.
Only more beautiful made by his death-like silence and absence.

--Longfellow's "Evangeline."

THE boy, perceiving the progress of our acquaintance, now threw out a suggestion:

"I say, miss, if this bloke's goin' to the same place as us, I wouldn't mind lettin' him take a spell o' drivin', and I'll ride. He needn't be frightened o' these yarramans. I got them like lambs."

"I have no objection, Sam. It rests with Mr. Collins. But don't imagine that we're tired of your company."

"I don't suppose you are," replied Sam, "but I want a smoke; an' I got too much manners to stink your clo'es with tobacker. I'd had a whiff when we stopped, on'y like a fool I forgot my matches in the hurry this mornin'. Wo, chaps! Hold the reins for one minit, miss." We altered the stirrups to his length, and he mounted: "Now, your matches, Collins."

"Do you want a pipe?" I asked.

"Let's see your pipe. That! No thanks! I got everything but matches. Well, we're right now. You go on ahead. Never mind me." Then the buggy horses resumed their steady trot, leaving Sam in the rear.

It was some minutes before the mutual constraint of passengers and driver wore off. The former--as I knew by my gift of intuition--were wondering whether I couldn't afford a new pair of boots. The latter--a poor arithmetician at best--was adding twenty-five to nineteen over and over again; but without being able to get the same result twice running.

But a reciprocal effort brought our gossiping apparatus into working order. It was a novel experience, to feel these educated and evidently exclusive women meekly endeavoring to stand well in my estimation. It seemed so like a restoration of the true Order of Things that I had temporary respite from the haunting consciousness of my entanglement with a Riverina lady who, in the slangy sense of the word, was too good for me. (But that is another romance.)

Rigby being our point of contact, the conversation leaned chiefly in his direction; and the women did most of the listening. Yet when a genial tact compelled either of them to contribute something, there was interest, as well as grammar, in what she said. I was not surprised to learn that, until four or five months previously, no one in Rigby's native region knew definitely the place of his self-exile. But Miss Flanagan's brother held some position in the publishing firm whose Melbourne agent had employed the prodigal; hence she had incidentally heard his name.

Miss Flanagan was a perfect stranger to the Colonel personally, though she knew his step-brothers and their families. The girls had been under her tuition a few months back. She was a teacher of mathematics, algebra and other inviting sciences in a ladies' seminary, and she and Miss Vanderdecken had been closely intimate for many years. She had taken a twelve months' holiday; and now the two were seeing what was to be seen in this right-hand lower section of the Eastern Hemisphere.

Each woman, in her own way, was profitable to me in spite of the prior soul-mortgage unhappily covering my moral securities; but, owing to a twenty-three years' contemplation of the snow-scape already described, my sympathy centred on Miss Vanderdecken. And though I had too much innate delicacy to go blurting out the General's nocturnal confidence to my pa, I felt deeply impressed by the concurrence which was bringing these two people together so felicitously, yet so involuntarily, after such long separation. At the time of that angry parting in the land of ague and dried apples the odds would have seemed a hundred millions to one against a purely fortuitous conjunction at the Farmers' Arms, Yooringa; nevertheless, this was coming to pass. Their lines of life must have been insensibly converging ever since, and yet the slightest dislocation in the tendency of event at any time during twenty-five years--one misfitting link in the chain of circumstances--and the parting would have held good for ever. Now I would make it my business to see that the connection was not missed at the last moment.

Presently a slight angle in the road brought into view the Farmers' Arms, two or three miles ahead and I pointed out the building to my passengers. From this time Miss Vanderdecken never spoke except in monosyllables, and though she was evidently on her mettle for firmness, there was something in her manner of breathing which made me wish I had given more attention to that branch of pathognomy which deals with the possible eccentricities of women who haven't seen their lovers for a quarter of a century. Miss Flanagan also looked perturbed, and I noticed that she was holding Miss Vanderdecken's hand. So I monologued with a fluent tongue and a speculative mind while we neared the pub, and drew up to a walk.

"Ah, there's the Colonel himself," said I, in an undertone, as we passed the house.

"No," whispered Miss Vanderdecken, with agony in her face, "there must be some mistake." And she averted her eyes from the figure of a bloated and sottish-looking, though decently dressed, old buffer who had just emerged from the bar door, and was slowly seating himself on the form on the verandah.

"In the parlor," said I. "You can see him through the window. I think he's reading a letter."

All her self-restraint could not repress something like a sob, as her eyes fell on the severely handsome profile of her countryman, framed by the open window. I drove on a few paces, and stopped at the gate of the yard. It seemed manifest that the women were leaving everything to me.

"Now, ladies," said I, "if this place is anything like what it was six months ago, you'll have to go on to the Royal, which is a traditionally respectable house, five or six miles ahead. In that case, I'll send Rigby with you; but I trust that I may feel justified in making arrangements for you here. Sam, just hook the horse on the fence, and take these reins."

"Thank you, Mr. Collins," murmured Miss Flanagan. "You're placing us under many obligations."

"Pray don't mention our arrival to Mr. Rigby just yet," added Miss Vanderdecken, in a quivering voice.

"I'll merely prospect the place. And let me repeat that if you fail to avail yourself of my further services, I must take it as a slight."

Both women bowed, without speaking. I entered the house, introduced myself to the bright young landlady, and saw at a glance that the government was much improved since Waterton's time. After making the necessary arrangements, I returned to the buggy, and Sam drove into the yard.

With the air of a Castilian noble, I assisted Miss Vanderdecken from the buggy. Meanwhile, Miss Flanagan had disembarked herself. The landlady received them with overflowing respect, and led the way into the house, while I followed, carrying two portmanteaux.

I had placed the luggage in the passage, and was wondering what was the proper thing to do next, when Miss Vanderdecken with a gesture of polite deprecation, stepped past the landlady, and detained me by a glance. The pathos in her appealing eyes and paled lips was heightened by the seven hours' deposit of dust on her features--nothing being clean about her but the whites of her eyes.

"I have no scruple in adding to my indebtedness, you see, Mr. Collins," said she, in a barely articulate voice, "but I should like to speak to your friend while I am here."

"Indeed, Miss Vanderdecken, apart from the pleasure of meeting your wishes, I shall be delighted to confer such a happiness on the Senator. A message from you at any time will find me in the parlor." And so I withdrew.

Chapter VI.

O if thou be'st the same Ægeas, speak.
And speak unto the same Æmilia!

--"Comedy of Errors," Act V., Scene 1.

"WELL," said Rigby to me as we left the bar, "my waggonette is down beside the waggons. Get your horses ready, and we'll follow Dixon and cast our lines in the river too."

"In the river of Time, Colonel?" said I dreamily. "Our lines are cast therein already, foolish one; and our business is to--Oh, now I know what you mean! But you should either qualify your river by its distinguishing adjective or call it by its strikingly appropriate name--for 'murrey' means dark red. If the people who frequent its banks don't know its proper title, I wonder who does; and they never speak of it loosely and indefinitely as 'the river'; they always call it the crimson river. Please bear this in mind, Major. It's the king of Australian rivers, and I naturally feel a little nettled to hear it shorn of its title. However, we're not going yet. Come into the parlor. There's a surprise in store for you. I providentially met an acquaintance of yours to-day--Miss Kate Vanderdecken. She knows you well, and has been the whole afternoon looking forward to meeting you. She's here now, taking her ease in her inn--the only way in which she resembles Sir John. She intends to stay all night; so I suppose you won't be down at the Red River till late."

"Ah! what did you say her name was?"

"Miss Kate Vanderdecken. Here's her card. She comes from your own blizzard-smitten land, and the unerring law of Happenology--the very law that moulds marbles to a spherical shape and controls the apparent vagaries of our planetary system--has landed her here, to give you an evening momentous enough to date from. How is that for lofty?"

"You bewilder me, Tom."

"I expected nothing less, Sheriff. By the way, there's another lady with her--Miss Artemisia Flanagan, and a calculator by profession as well as by nationality. Hence I'm glad to see you so clean and presentable, though, to do you justice, I knew your habits, and was under no apprehension. I'm as proud of you as if you were one of my own. Turn round, till I see if there's any grass-seed, or horse-hair, or whitewash on your back. No, you're humanly perfect; you would pass for a married man of the upper middle classes. You know a married woman always keeps her old impostor trim and tidy, even to the inner ply of apparel, so that in case of him getting killed off a horse, or in a railway accident, there will be no damaging discredit reflected upon the widow."

"I feel like a man in a dream, Tom," said Rigby, absently. "You haven't told me how you came to--"

"Mr. Collins," said the low, soft voice of Miss Flanagan, who paused in the doorway, then glided into the room, acknowledging the Deacon's presence by a slight bow and a penetrating glance.

I introduced the two Down-Easters, and at the end of three minutes desultory conversation perceived that Rigby was weighed in the balance and found genuine. Such is the inconceivable despatch of feminine judgment.

Then Miss Flanagan led us to the private parlor, where, with a couple of nicely-turned phrases, which I had rapidly concocted and committed to memory, I presented the long-severed friends to each other. Miss Vanderdecken, exquisitely lovely in a simple dress of creamy white, betrayed no trace of her former agitation. Her face, always sweet and engaging, was now transfigured, glorified, by the emotions of woman-hood at its best; and, indeed, I never saw Rigby appear to such advantage as under the inspiration of her presence. Of course, there was no crash, nor was there any embarrassment on either side, nothing but a graceful interchange of courtesies and polite solicitude, and presently the Senator, according to his custom, settled down into the leading part. Still, I could detect, under the grave tenderness of his manner, a certain abstraction, easily accounted for as things stood.

I remained only five or ten minutes. Then, promising to call on my new friends in the morning as I went out, I retired with some ceremony, readily pardonable when you consider everything. I had furnished the epilogue to a drama of thrilling interest. Alone I did it, and therefore felt morally and socially uplifted.

Chapter VII.

I see a column of slow-rising smoke
O'ertop the lofty wood, that skirts the wild.
A vagabond and useless tribe there eat
Their miserable meal.

--Cowper's "Task," Book 1.

WHILST re-saddling Bunyip, I got into conversation with Sam, who was making friends with Pup, obviously with a view to his seduction, the latter being no difficult matter by reason of the strong spiritual affinity always existent between a boy and a kangaroo dog.

"Fond o' scenery, ain't they?" remarked Sam, as he passed me the girth from the off side.

"Who?"

"Them shemales I fetched. That's what they come for. Dashed if I could see any scenery about. I say, which o' them do you fancy most?"

"Both about equal. Which is your choice?"

"Well, I ain't at liberty. I'm ordered. But I should say Arty. I like them a good size."

"Which Arty?"

"Miss Flanagan. Her with no feet."

"How far are you going up the river?"

"No furder. Back to-morrow or next day. They jist hired the buggy for a couple or three days to come on this fur. My word, they was in luck to git me for takin' charge of them. Touch-an'-go. Happened to be out o' work, on account o' my boss havin' to clear, with a warrant after him for biggany."

"For what?"

"Biggany. Havin' two wives, both to the fore. Rotten contract, ain't it? Wheelwright by trade. Me an' him was getting on grand together, only for this bust up. I got another place to start improver, soon's I git back. Wheelwrightin' ain't a bit stinkin' for a trade--is it? Got a few new idears ripenin' ready for when I git on my own. See, most o' the wheelwrights is imported beggars; an' they can't be expected to have the best quality o' brains. Wish I had that dog."

"What use would he be to you, Sam?"

"Well, a feller must have a dog, an' he may as well have a kangaroo dog. Where you clearin' off to?"

"Down to the river, to camp with some chaps I know. Come and have a drink of soft tack before I go."

"Not this time, thanks. We fetched a dozen bottles o' lemonade, an' each o' the shemales drunk two bottles, an' you drunk one, an' I polished off the other seven or eight--not to speak of a gorger before we started. That'll do me to-day. My inside's all furmentin' now. You could hop a marble off o' my stummick."

"You'll soon get over that, Sam. So long."

"So long."

The sun was still half-an-hour high when I repassed the pub, and turned down the reserve. Half a mile along the line of fence, and just where the latter ran into the river, I found the two waggons, and, near them, Rigby's covered waggonette. By Dixon's directions, I took my horses across a dry billabong, and, mindful of the escaped thirty-pounder, brought a fishing rod back with me. I had hooks and lines in my swag.

Whilst cutting this rod, I noticed a curious thing. Close beside me stood the shell-stump of a freshly-felled hollow tree; and about twenty feet along the prostrate trunk was a newly-cut aperture that a middle-sized man could nicely creep through. And straight above the stump, in mid-air, was a little stationary dark cloud easily resolvable into a multitude of bees. The loud, menacing hum hinted that they were by no means in the best of temper. They had come home from all quarters to find things not merely disarranged, but vanished entirely, like the early cloud and the morning dew. Here a phrenologist would think it strange that an organ of locality, perfect enough to guide its possessor through the undiversified air, should be so poorly balanced by perceptive and reflective faculties that the subject, in the first place, couldn't see what had happened, and, in the second place, couldn't reason out the certainty that its tree must be somewhere, and that the best way to find it would be to look for it. But the case appeared to bear out my theory that we are all specialists. And it seemed to clash with Lubbock's hypothesis, namely, that the bee has no intuition of locality, but steers its course by sight alone. At all events these bees, being like myself, conservative in tendency, were lost for lack of a precedent. Hard work and no play had tied Jack immovably to the fine "old moorings"--had, in fact, paralysed his reasoning faculty and extinguished his initiative, thus making him a model wealth-producer and a never-failing text for the Thrift-homilist.

Yet the lack of this perceptive shingle on the thought-dome of a docile wealth-producer sometimes upsets the calculations of the wise and prudent. For instance, an intimate friend of mine was a most able and accomplished theorist. Like Columbus, he was a man with a fad; and this fad was the common domestic hen. He maintained that women, owing to a constitutional dearth of enterprise and understanding, were incompetent to manage these birds. But, having worked the thing out scientifically in his own mind, he saw his way to fortune in a flock of judiciously-crossed Black Spanish and Brahmapootra, stiffened by a strain of the Dorking, with, perhaps, a blend of the Orpington for fertility, and just a suggestion of the Wyandotte, as a precaution against pip.

Under this impression, he sold out his grocery business and bought a small farm. Here he supervised the erection of ten hen-houses, to begin with. Each little edifice was fitted with nests, ladders, roosts, etc., and was mounted on four low block-wheels. Next he obtained a supply of hens, and allotting twenty-four of these unassuming producers to each caravan, he spent a week in training them to consider themselves at home. Then at the dead hour of the night he hooked a steady old horse to each hen-house in turn, and distributed them, with their sleeping tenants, over paddock No. 1. During the ensuing day, the hens, spreading out like sheep, fared sumptuously on locusts, grubs, seeds, etc.; and in the evening they retired--not to their houses, but to the vacant spots from whence those abodes had been shifted.

There was nothing for it, of course, but to carry each slumbering imbecile to her proper address--a work which occupied half the night--and this task had to be repeated every evening for a week. By this time, according to the system so elaborately worked out, commissariat conditions necessitated a removal of the caravans to No. 2 paddock; and for six or eight nights each former site in No. 1 was pathetically indicated by the globular forms of two dozen somnolent hens. Nor did this innocent contumacy admit of any remedy; for the whole physical construction of the feathered races, particularly their external finish, clearly indicates that Nature has not designed them to be cowhided with satisfaction or profit. Anyway, the enterprise ended ignominiously; and now, if you want to make an enemy of that most amiable experimenter, you have only to introduce the subject of hens.

"Just set down an' wire in," was Dixon's salute when I returned to the camp. "Soda bread, an' bacon, an' honey, ad (adj.) libitum. Dunno whether you like mustard mixed up or not. We always eat it dry. Ain't got sich a thing as a swappin' book on you, I s'pose?" he continued, as we settled down to the provender. "One o' Nathaniel Hawthorne's here, waitin' for a new owner. Can't suffer that author no road. He's a (adj.) fool; too slow to catch grubs."

"Haven't got a book to my name, Dixon. Flying as light as possible this trip. What are you reading now?"

"Bible," replied Dixon, with a touch of self-righteousness, whilst indicating with a sideward glance the noblest compilation on earth, where it lay in a kerosene-box, together with a supply of tobacco and matches, a large dictionary, and well-worn pack of cards, and the insufferable Hawthorne. "Got her in a swap for one o' Ouidar's," he continued. "Ignorant galoots, they'll tell you she's a passel o' nonsense; but strikes me very forcible the bloke that wrote the Bible he had forgot more'n them other (sceptics) ever learned. An' as for it bein' true--why, Jerusalem's to the good now, large as life, for anybody to see. 'Spect you're a bit o' a ringer on Scripture?"

"I only wish I was. Certainly, I had to read a good deal of it when I was too young to understand."

"That's on'y yer misfortune," replied Dixon gravely. "It ain't yer fault. That's where my main (adj.) hold is--graspin' what I read. Never knowed no more about the Bible three monce ago nir I knowed about my gran'mother. Matter o' course, I thought hell was on'y a man's own conscience; thought the divil was only a sort o' byword; thought God was nature; an' so on. But I foun' things a (adj.) sight different. No (adj.) shinnanigan about the Bible. It ain't frightened about offendin' people; an' it don't give one stick o' tobacker difference between Abraham on his throne an' the (derelict) at his gate, loafiin' for the manavelins off of his table. That's what I like her for. Straightest book ever wrote. But she gave me a (adj.) fright," he continued, in an altered tone. "A (sheol) of a (adj.) fright," he repeated thoughtfully.

"But surely you didn't find it all discouraging?" I argued, contemplating with a listless interest the fine forehead and engaging face of the bullock driver.

"Dunno," replied Dixon dubiously. "Most of it's (adj.) frightensome. But mebbe things'll work roun' all right by the time a feller dies. Sneak in some (adj.) road. Anyhow, I'm glad I ain't a Scribe, nor yet a Pharisee, nor yet a hypocrite."

A minute of sombre silence, for our parallel forecasts had reached the confines of that void whereinto no ray of science may penetrate, to dissolve the hundred shapeless, flickering wisps of Dogma.

Chapter VIII.

Yea also, when he that is a fool walketh by the way, his wisdom faileth him, and he saith to everyone that he is a fool.

--"Ecclesiastes," X. 3.

BUT the fascination of a new book was on the receptive mind of my companion; so, judiciously waiving the unpleasanter features of the work, he gave his harmless pedantry its fling.

"Samson, he was the strongest (individual) ever lived," he remarked, in a careless tone; "an' Solomon he was the wisest--an' who do you think was the foolishest?"

"The man who built his house on the sand," I suggested.

"Ain't come to that bloke yet," replied Dixon; "but I'm thinkin' Moses could give him about halfways an' lick him (adv.) bad. Yes, Moses was the foolishest (person) ever lived. Bible cracks him up, mind you, because he was a decent feller in his own sort o' soft-headed way. But he didn't know his road roun'. Cripes, if I got slants like him I'd shift things a bit! My (adj.) oath!"

"Israelite, wasn't he?" I hazarded. "Perhaps I've been mixing him up with somebody else."

"Ought to guard agen that," replied Dixon kindly. "No; he was a Hebrew. Properly speaking, Israelites is Jews. But Moses cottoned to the Israelites. That was his first bit o' foolishness after he got on his own hook. When he was quite a young feller his brothers sold him for thirty bob to some Ishmaelites merchantmen on account of him always dreamin' he was goin' to be cock-o'-the-walk an' not bein' able to keep his (adj.) dreams to his self. Anyhow, he foun' his road into Egypt, an' there he dropt across the Jews. Seems, so fur as I can make out, a feller name o' Parryo was bossin' the whole show in Egypt; an' he had some sort o' (adj.) purchase on the Jews; an' he kep them making bricks and druv them most unmerciful; an' they didn't know what the (adj. sheol) to do about it; so natural enough, they cried unto the Lord.

"Well, them ole times, the Lord used to mix Himself up a lot with people an' take no end o' trouble tryin' to keep things a bit straight; and He looked roun' for the foolishest bloke He could find to take on such a (adv.) dead--horse racket as gettin' the Jews out o' this perdicament, an' the (person) He picked out was Moses--a feller that might 'a' bin a swell among the Egyptians if he'd knowed when he was well off."

(If the student of this simple memoir should thoughtlessly impute anything like irreverence to Dixon, I hereby warn her that she does so at her own risk--at the gravest of all risks, namely, the risk of doing injustice. The comrade of nature, unconsciously profane, is rarely irreverent, never flippant. For instance, though Dixon habitually uttered the name "God," without the slightest mitigation or remorse of voice, the pronunciation of "the Lord" was unaffected, grave and devout. Briefly, the worst you can say of this wild-flower of the plains is that his Jahvistic idea was anthropomorphically on a level with that of the writers of the Pentateuch, and that his phraseology was governed by his vocabulary.)

So, innocently paraphrasing the sacred narrative he continued:

"Accordin'ly, Moses went an' barracked with this Parryo to let the Children go. (They're always alluded to by the name o' 'children' on account o' their (adj.) uselessness, an' pigheadedness, an' frightenedness). Fust go off, Moses on'y ast, quite simple like, for all hands to get a couple or three days' spell, an' fetch their live stock, an' flittin', an' tucker, an' every (adj.) thing they could rake up to sacrifice to the Lord in the wilderness.

"'Rats!' says Parryo. 'Gorstruth!' says he, 'did you think you'd come Paddy over me? Won't wash no (adj.) road. Jist you (adv.) well scoot back,' says he to Moses, 'and tell the Children to buck into their work a bit livelier, or, take my (adj.) word for it,' says he, 'I'll straighten the (malingerers) up!'

"But the Lord He backed up Moses, an' sent locusts, an' pleuro, an' Scotch greys, an' all manner o' curses on the country. Some sort o' oversight, seemin'ly, for it was the people that fell in, and Parryo never turned a (adj.) hair. Anyhow, after no end o' disturbance, the Jews got clear; an' Parryo he rallied up the Egyptians an' sooled 'em on to foller. Then a thing took place that no livin' man would believe, without he seen it for his own self, or read it in the Bible. Seems when the Children come to the Red Sea the water formed up into a (adv.) great bank on both sides, an' they walked across, quite unconcerned. Then when the Egyptians follered, the water walloped together, an' the Egyptians was (adv.) well had. Course, it ain't our place to say the wrong people was wiped out by mistake. I s'pose it was to be.

"Well, Moses he knowed the track to the Land o' Canaan, an' he went with the Children to show them the road. This was a land flowin' with milk an' honey, but there was some middling rough stages across a bit o' country called the Wilderness o' Sin. Anyone would think they'd put up with a trifle o' hardship, considerin' what was behind them and what was in front, but they begun to growl at Moses for fetchin' them into the wilderness to die. That was always their (adj.) chorus--'fetchin' us into the wilderness to die.'

"Then when the Lord foun' this was the sample o' thanks He was gittin' for all the trouble He'd took, He said He'd let them die and be d--d to them on'y for a promise He'd made to Aminadab years and years before. So he sent quails an' mannar, as much as they could (adv.) well tuck into them. No go. They was like some new chums that's bin halfstarved at home, an' jammed together like fleeces in a bale; an' these is the very blokes that can't find a good word to say about a country where they got any gosquantity o' room to look roun' an' a slant to be their own boss if they (adv.) well like. So, accordin' to accounts, they murmured agen Moses, sayin':

"'What the (adj. sheol) did you want fetchin' us out of Egypt, where we had as much meat and vegetables as you could shake a stick at?' says they. 'You (adj.) rotten (charlatan),' says they, 'seems like's if you was workin' some little point fetchin' us into the wilderness to (adv.) well die.'

"Then the Lord--He was fearful hot-tempered them 'ole times--He says, 'Stan' clear, Moses.' Says He, 'I'll destroy these (adj.) varmin, promise or no promise; an' you can make a fresh start with yer own kids.'

"Slant for Moses. Fact, you couldn't propose anythin' softer--but what d' you think the (adj.) fool done?"

"Snapped at it?" I suggested.

"Prayed for the (adj.) weeds," responded Dixon, emphatically. "Prayed for 'em. Well, I be--," he paused to select some adequate self--imprecation, culled a suitable one, and delivered it with a vigorous rattle of consonants...

"'Well, I'll only jist thin 'em out a bit this time,' says the Lord. 'Must stop their (adj.) jaw some road.' So He sent swarms o' snakes into the camp; but whether the snakes picked out the individuals that growled, or whether they bit anybody they could ketch, the Bible don't say. Anyhow, Moses rigged up a brass snake on a pole, an' stopped the poison actin.' It ain't as clear as it might be, but things was different in them ole times.

"Well, these Jews they sort of verbed along through the Wilderness of Sin, till they come to the Land o' Canaan; an' Moses he sent twelve spies on ahead to spy out the nakedness o' the land, an' these emissaries fetched back a sample bunch o' grapes, as much as two o' them could stagger under. The account they give of the country was that a land flowin' with milk an' honey was no name for it; but the Canaanites, an' the Rechabites, an' the Mammonites, an' all the other (adj.) ites looked like as if they was able to take their own (adj.) part agen anybody that come foolin' roun' with the idea of shiftin' 'em.

"'We'll (adv.) soon see about that,' says Moses. 'We're on for possessin' that land, no matter if we got to take a couple or three (adv.) good lickin's at the start. Audaces fortuna (adj.) juvat,' says he. 'All in favour o' this dart will please signify the same in the usual manner,' says he. An' what do you think the Jews done?"

"Gave three cheers," I suggested.

"Yes. Vill you buy a vatch? They lifted up their voice an' wept. Lifted up their voice an' (adv.) well wept.

"'To (sheol) with you an' yer (adj.) Land o' Canaan, you blatherin' morepoke,' says they to Moses. 'This comes o' you fetchin' us out o' Egypt, where our hides was whole, no matter if we was welted up to our work now an agen. We gone quite fur enough,' says they, 'so we'll stone you to death for makin' a (adj.) fool of us, an' off back to Egypt before we die o' fright.'

"'Stan' o' one side, Moses,' says the Lord. 'I ain't goin' to put up with this sort of (adj.) nonsense one minit longer. No use argying with a certain class o' people. I'll jist wipe out these (adj.) soojee (cravens), an' make a great nation out o' you an' yer own picaninnies.'

"Slant number fifty, or so, for Moses; an' what does the (adj.) fool do but he prays for the apostates again. Prays for 'em.

"'Have it so, then,' says the Lord, but they got to go back into the Wilderness of Sin an' do another perisher. Sin by name an' sin by nature.'

"'Hold on,' says the Jews. 'We're on the (adj.) job. We'll go an' possess the land.'

"'Not if I know it,' says the Lord. 'You should have thought about that before. Too late now. You're like the Portigee divil--when you're good, you're too good. Back you go to the Wilderness an' think the (adj.) thing over for a matter o' forty years. We'll have another confab about it when you got some o' the stiffenin' took out o' your (adj.) necks.'

"Course, this druv the Jews to desperation, an' they roused up all hands an' went to hunt the old inhabitants out o' the land. Moses, he argied with 'em an' told 'em the Lord was departed from them, but they only ordered him off. Six rails an' a cap wouldn't hold 'em. Fair bustin' with false pluck an' bluff an' blatherskite.

"Best instance of Moses's foolishness. One time he was away on some business with the Lord, an' the Jews they scraped up all their jewellery an' melted it, an' made a golden calf, and was holdin' a corroboree over it an' goin' on with their (adj) childishness, as usual, an' up comes Moses, ropeable--an' what d'you think he done?"

"Confiscated the calf?" I suggested.

"Not his (adj.) height. He seized it, like a case o' tobacker at the Customs, an' groun' it into powder, an' mixed it with water, an' made the delinquents drink the water--an' so good-bye to as much as would have kep him independent for life. Fair chased with every (adj.) description o' slants, an' never froze on to one o' them. Got worse as he got older, an' died at last on top of a mountain, like some pore swaggie--a man that might hav bin at the very top o' the tree if he'd collared half the slants that come his road. I got no pity for a feller like that. Fact, I got no pity for anybody that crawls after Jews. Bad eggs, the Jews. When them temporisers was commanded to do anythin' good they used to forgit, or buck, or dodge out of it some (adj.) road; but when they was commanded to stone anybody--whoop! they was there quick an' lively. My (adj.) oath."

"Much the same with ourselves at the present day, Dixon," I remarked, with the magnanimity of one who has dined well. "Think over it every time you hear of somebody getting hanged."

"Moke of a different color," replied the bullock driver gravely, as he began to pack away his primitive table-service. "The world's a (sheol) of a sight better now nor it was in them ole times, an' the main reason is because there's a fair mixter of other people stead of Jews, Jews, Jews runnin' the whole (adj.) contract. Another thing's got a lot to do with it"--he paused, then continued with marked reverence--"there's a (adv.) great improvement in the Lord's way o' workin'. Eased off a lot--ain't He?" Another pause, then in a wistful tone, whilst suspending his domestic labor. "Now, onna bright, Collins, do you think the fear of the Lord will save a person?"

"We're led to believe so."

"But is that what you was taught, or is it only yer own (adj.) idea?"

"It's what I was taught, and taught by professing Christians!"

"My strong point," responded Dixon, with ill-concealed relief. "Grand (adj.) holt--ain't she? Spes tutissima (adj.) coelis." He lit his pipe on the strength of her. "Hello, here's Rigby. More the merrier. Plenty a tea in the billy, anyhow." And he proceeded to relay the spread corn sack with his frugal store.

Chapter IX.

The stranger's hand to the stranger, yet--
For a roving folk are mine--
The stranger's store for the stranger set--
And the camp-fire glow the sign.

--Henry Lawson.

RIGBY met my glance of surprise with a faraway, dreamy look; then, with the same preoccupied air, he walked across to his waggonette, and drew his tucker-box from beneath the seat. Whereupon Dixon became so frankly offensive that Rigby put the box back, and took his place at the bullock driver's ocean-bounded table.

"I didn't expect you so soon, Colonel," he remarked.

"I can't stay long," he replied. "Nice evening." The latter observation was addressed to a flash-looking young man, who came up with a rod and a line in his hand.

"I've seen worse, an' at the same time, I've seen better," replied the young fellow. "Whereabouts was it that your mate caught that thirty-pounder?" he continued, turning to Dixon.

"Sit down and have a drink of tea," replied the bullock driver. "Who was tellin' you about that (adj.) fish?"

"What's that got to do with you? I want to know where he caught it?"

"Well, you kin jist (adv.) well find out," replied Dixon with dignity. "Polite sort o' (person) you are," he continued as the other strode away. "Bin dragged up anyhow, seemin'ly."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Kangaroo hunter, supposed to be. One (adj.) horse an' no dogs. Nothin' but a rifle. Camped over there, aside the big log. Look out for yer dog to--night, Collins."

"More sacks to the mill," I remarked, as another man approached us with a fishing-rod in his hand. A little, puny, mild-looking man this time.

"Good evening, gentlemen. I believe Thompson hooked a fine fish this morning somewhere here?"

"Who was tellin' you?" asked Dixon.

"That foreigner up at the pub."

"Well, yes; he got a thirty-pounder this mornin'," replied Dixon suavely. "Landed her after a (sheol) of a (adj.) struggle, but when he thought she was safe, away she goes slitherin' down the bank an' into the (adj.) river agen. Have a drink o' tea. There's a (adj.) pannikin."

"I've just had supper, thank you."

"What're you baitin' with?"

"Bit of roasted 'possum--can't beat it," replied the visitor, as he retired towards the river bank.

"Decent little (fellow)," commented Dixon, without waiting till the other had got out of hearing. "Londoner, by profession cockney, with no inside. Name o' Furlong. Scrats out a (adv.) good livin' 'possumin' in the winter, when the skins is good. That's his (adj.) spring cart over there. He on'y come this forenoon; an' now he's got dozens o' sheepskins in the lagoons, fishing' for leeches. Gits the raw pelts cheap at the wash and sen's the (adj.) leeches to Melbn' wholesale. Great little (fellow) Stuff any (adj.) thing, from a emu to a tomtit. Best (adj.) bee-hunter in these parts, too. Got a eye like a (adj.) hawk. Got a bee-tree this afternoon, that I'd bin walkin' past a dozen times, an' he collars that (adv.) great treacle can an' he fills her full o' honey for me, an' no compliment."

While imparting these biographical notes, Dixon had taken from an adjacent hollow stump an old billy half-full of live mussels, in water; now he laid three of these in front of the fire and replaced the billy.

"Allowed to be the best (adj.) 'possumer on the track," he resumed; "an' he tells me he wasn't worth a (courtesan's) curse at the trade he was brought up to."

"A familiar experience, Dixon," remarked Rigby, partially rousing himself from his reverie. "Non omnia possumus omnes--which may be freely translated, 'We can't all of us be 'possumers.'"

"Hum," replied Dixon, warily. "Anyhow, me an' him got acquainted campin' together on the Island two years ago. That (man's) got a blessin' on him, jist the same's Thompson's got his (adj.) curse. Spends mostly all his spare time readin' the Bible an' prayin'. Puts the (adj.) stuns on me how some chaps kin be so good. Roughest contract ever anybody took on is to do everything to the glory of God, but that (fellow) manages it. Can't you eat no more, Rigby? Well, I'll pack up the (adj.) jewel'ry-box, an' we'll go an' have a shake for this thirty-(adj.)-pounder."

Meanwhile, I had rigged up my fishing-tackle. Rigby, having finished his meal, glanced at his watch, hesitated a moment, then walked to his waggonette, and returned with a jointed fishing-rod. Dixon's tackle was already prepared. Each of us took one of the gaping mussels and baited his hook with the naked mollusc, now shrunken and toughened by the slight roasting which had opened the shell.

"My intentions ran on another kind of fishing," remarked Rigby to me, as we made our way down the bank. "However, I may combine the two forms for a very short time, since the circumstances are so contributory as almost to amount to compulsion."

He was right. Better conditions could not have been supplied to order. Three large red gums stood on the edge of the river ten or twelve yards apart, and their roots, washed clean by the stream, afforded seats and foothold anywhere on the steep slope; while before us the faintly-swirling water seemed full of promise. The kangaroo-hunter and Furlong were already seated, watching their floats. The fascination of the thirty-pounder was over us all.

It was a beautiful evening--dead calm, with just that flavor of sultriness which, at a later hour, matures into temperature so perfect that the most accomplished tippler wouldn't know whether he wanted his refreshment iced or mulled. Any person whose smelling apparatus was not debauched by smoking would have found the air fragrant with scent of pennyroyal and rich with aroma exhaled from countless tons of eucalyptus leaves. Best of all, no annoying hum of mosquitoes marred a concert of evening sounds, made up by the homely clatter of myriad frogs, and the tangled melody of a dozen bells, copious in range of tone and timbre. And from time to time, like a drunken Welshman talking in his sleep, came the guttural discourse of a 'possum, or perhaps the mumble of a bear; while at shorter intervals some solitary mopoke solemnly announced himself by name, eliciting occasional response from two or three faraway friends, who seemed to call themselves "pope-pope"--certain sound-waves of the note being exhausted in transit. Three hilarious kookaburras, sitting side by side on a dead branch close by, did their best to liven things up before retiring for the night; while now and then some dejected curlew yelled his probably imaginary woes on the sympathetic air; and away in different directions the monotonous and foolish barking of several dogs might lead the thrifty soul to meditate on the unpreventable leakage of Energy in this world of ours.

Behind where we sat, a sheep-proof fence, running down from the pub, terminated in one of the three big trees I mentioned. The east side of this fence was a grazing paddock, consisting of frontage land, purchased or stolen by a squatter in the good old times, and now rented by a local boss--cockie. The pub was part of the same property, all belonging to some indefinite person in Melbourne. Just behind us, a section of charred ruins, overgrown with nettles and variegated thistles, showed where the old out--station had stood in the corner of the land. The place was known as Cameron's Paddock, from the name of the second last, and longest--bleeding, tenant.

The west side of the fence was river frontage, the red-gum flats coming southward to the road, while the river itself swept away miles to the north, and again approached the road about two miles westward, thus forming a fine bend, mostly inaccessible to loafing sheep, by reason of billabongs, lagoons, and swamps, and therefore much valued by such bullock drivers as knew its geography, and could avail themselves of its resources.

Here I may remark that, as a rule, the trans-Murrumbidgee bullock driver, like the emu, is more inclined to follow water conservation northward through the back blocks than to drift down into the distracting civilisation of the Murray. But Thompson, Dixon, and a few others, being Victorians and familiar with many desirable spots along the Border River, sometimes condescended--condescended--I say, to put in a month or two on their native territory when the grasshoppers began to starve on the plains through which the Lachlan ought to have run. Victorian trips were too degradingly short, and Victorian wheat too abominably heavy handling for these aristocrats; but, as Falstaff says, young men must live and seasons are not unknown when--to use a composite metaphor for which Thompson is responsible--the rat who refuses to leave the sinking ship will be reduced to live on the boiled tongues of his own dead bullocks. Thompson had been that rat.

Whilst we were selecting comfortable seats and throwing our lines into the river, the rhythmic pattering of a cantering horse came faintly on the air, followed by the jangle of a bell at the waggons on the bank above us, and the shrill neigh of a liberated animal, starting in search of his mates. Then Rigby, mentally shaking himself up, turned toward me and murmured confidentially:

"By the way, I was just going to ask you--"

"That you, Thompson?" shouted Dixon.

"No," replied Thompson, appearing on the bank. "How are you, Rigby? I'm glad to see you. All hands fishing? Any luck?"

"Stacks of it, so fur," replied Dixon, "only it ain't the proper specie. Layin' wait for that (adj.) thirty-pounder you lost here. Ole Parley-voo told us about her."

"Ah, I remember I mentioned it to him this morning. And there's five of you on the contract, like the five foolish virgins in the Bible. However, I'll keep you company, if anyone can shout me a bait."

"Plenty mussels in the ole billy in the holler stump aside the (adj.) fire," replied Dixon. "Don't roast none but the one you want. Keep the molluscs fresh. Letter for you in the pocket o' yer (adj.) waggon--forrided from Hay."

"Only somebody sticking me up for damages, or claiming one of my bullocks, or threatening me with seven years for passing a bad cheque, or perhaps some new style of misfortune," replied Thompson wearily, as he turned back to prepare his fishing-tackle.

"Swore off smokin' a fortnit ago, an' he naturally gits as miserable as a bandicoot when night comes on," observed Dixon. "Reckons to git his (adj.) curse shifted through knockin' off his bad habits little by little. Hard to say. Worth tryin', anyhow."

While we mused over this suggestion--each in his own way--Thompson joined us, threw his line into the river, seated himself on a root, and sighed deeply.

"I get melancholy every time I see this camp," he remarked. "I knew the people that lived here, where the house is burned down. Old associations of ten years ago. Now everything's changed, and changed for the worse. The people are gone--gave up the place three or four years back, and selected away towards the Coolaman. The waggon I had then is at the bottom of the Murrumbidgee, the bullocks are gone, every scrap of tackle is gone, the horse is gone, even the dog is gone; my youth is gone; my hopes are gone; and I'm neither use nor ornament in the world. It would take a smarter man than myself to tell what I'm living for."

"Sic transit gloria (adj.) mundi," observed Dixon, as if to himself.

"What was her name?" asked Rigby.

"Agnes," replied Thompson sadly. "Their house stood on the bank behind us here, where you see the thistles growing now. Her father was a hard, strict, religious Scotchman, with fierce eyebrows. His name was Cameron--Lyon Cameron."

"I came across a sheep-drover name o' 'Swearing Cameron,' three seasons ago," remarked Dixon, thoughtfully. "Might be some relation. These things often runs in the blood."

"I'll tell you the whole story," pursued Thompson, "and you'll see what it is for a man to live in the position that I'm in. His whole life is just composed of retreats from Moscow, one after another. Sometimes it seems to slacken off a bit, and you think the infernal thing has sort of exhausted itself, but it's only gathering strength for a fresh spring; and before you know what you're about, it's on you again. I'm not a superstitious man myself, but I can't help noticing that ever since I cheated that dead man Providence seems to go clean out of its way to have a clip at me. Now, this instance of Agnes Cameron is a proof of what I say."

During this confession the little trapper, leaving the butt of his rod jammed among the roots, had picked his way along the water-scarped bank to the speaker's side.

"I beg your pardon," said he, in a low, eager voice, "were you camped about two miles from Mathoura, four years ago--four years on the third of March last?"

Thompson pondered. "I don't remember--Oh, yes, that's all right."

"I was sure I knew your voice," replied Furlong. "I just camped here to--day." A pause. Then the two shook hands, and the trapper returned to his line.

Chapter X.

For rustic youths could I a list produce
Of Stephen's books, how great might be the use;
But evil fate was theirs--survey'd, enjoy'd.
Some happy months, and then by force destroyed
So will'd the Fates--but these, with patience read.
Had vast effect on Stephen's heart and head.

--Rev. George Crabbe--"The Learned Boy."

"YES, boys," continued Thompson, sadly. "She was the only girl I ever was properly in love with, and one Sunday I took her out in a canoe--"

"This won't do, Steve," I interrupted, with some severity. "You must tell us how you met her first, and what induced you to fall in love with her; also what sort of a canoe it was, and who you stole it from--and, in fact, all the details."

"I can tell you exactly what caused me to fall in love with her, Tom. It was yourself that did it--indirectly, of course. I'll tell you how. It was in January, '73, that I camped in this bend for the first time, to have a few months' spell before the next wool. Now, you remember that I met you at Deniliquin in the spring of '72, and we spent a Sunday together at my camp on the common? Do you remember telling me then that there were ten masterpieces of poetry that nobody on earth except yourself had ever read clean through, or ever would? I took a list of them at the time, if you remember, but, in any case, I'm not likely to forget the names. Let's see--'Paradise Lost' and 'Regained,' counting the two as one; Goethe's 'Faust,' especially the second part; Dante's 'Divine Comedy,' Spenser's 'Faery Queene,' Thomson's 'Seasons,' Cowper's 'Task,' Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,' Edwin Arnold's 'Light of Asia,' and, lastly, any poem of Walt Whitman's.

"Well, being young and flash at the time, I began to think how I would shine if I had those books at my finger ends, and you know the sort of lunacy that comes over a man when he fancies himself good enough to go through with a thing that everybody has shied clear of. I seemed to look forward into the future and hear people saying: 'See that cove! that's the man I was telling you about--that's Thompson--best-educated fellow on the track.' And this ambition got possession of me till at last I wrote to Cole for the price of the best rough-and-ready editions delivered at the Melbourne Railway Station. The end of the matter was, that the parcel was waiting for me at Echuca when I crossed the river on my way to this bend to spell for the next wool. Of course, the ten books included a lot of reading that wasn't properly in the contract, but I wanted to be on the safe side, and I was game for anything in the way of reading.

"I camped on a little sand-hill, half-a-mile across there. I had nothing to interfere with my reading except to boil the billy about once a day, and make a damper about once a week; and between my natural laziness and the strain on my mind, I got too feeble to do even that much properly. But I stuck to my studies, though I'm a slow reader at the best of times. When I got so disgusted with one book that I couldn't face another line, I used to take a spell and then tackle some other book, and so on--always marking the place where I knocked off, and never slumming a word."

"But we want your love-story, Steve," interposed the Major.

"This is my love-story, and I'm telling it according to Tom's specifications. Better decide whether I'm to study your taste or his. Or, if you like, I'll drop it altogether."

"Ne Jupiter quidem (adj.) omnibus," observed Dixon, sententiously.

"Are you to the fore?" growled Thompson. "You ought to be yarded, without water or tucker, till you learn to speak English again."

"Didn't mean no (adj.) offence," replied Dixon, scoring heavily with the ostentatious mildness of his tone. "I only shoved in a word, as a amicus (adj.) curiae in a manner o' speakin'."

"We all apologise; myself foremost," said Rigby. "Go on with your story in your own way."

"Very well," replied Thompson. "After I had been camped about a month I went across one day to enquire about a roan steer that had taken up with my bullocks, and there I saw Agnes for the first time. She was a fine lump of a girl, no doubt; but my mind was so disordered and stupefied by the class of books I had been reading that she seemed like a bird of paradise, and she'll have that appearance to me, as long as I've got a head on my body." He paused, and sighed deeply.

"Well, I bought this roan steer off Cameron, and that started a sort of acquaintance. Agnes was just twenty, and she had two brothers of sixteen or seventeen. Mrs. Cameron was a nice, fat, easy-going sort of woman, frightened to death of Cameron. Everybody was frightened of that man, and no one worse than myself. Most God-fearing man I ever knew. But the boys were great disciples of mine. Many an evening the three of us have sat fishing here, where we are now. And many a Sunday morning I've dressed myself as like a Presbyterian elder as I could come to, and sneaked across here, to fawn like a dog on Cameron, and go mooning about the place like a harmless lunatic. By-and-bye I got a letter from my sister that fairly knocked me. Cameron happened to be a townie of my father's next neighbour (that was old McFarlane, Tom), and it seems he had written to this cove for particulars about me. Not much to build upon, of course, but I fancied that Cameron afterwards talked to me in a tone that I could imagine him using to the son of a respectable man, and I caught at the hope as the drowning man catches at--"

"Not at a straw, if you please, Steve," interposed Rigby.

"Well--at an anvil. However, time passed till I began to think about starting for Hay. Mind you, I was in a curious position. Agnes and I understood each other, of course, and we felt that nothing short of death would shift either of us, but then again we seemed to have very little say in the matter. We were both in such bodily fear of her dad that we were sort of paralysed. It's all very well for you to say that you'd have done this, or that, or the other thing. You'd play (sheol). So would I. But if you were withered up with the course of study that I had gone through, and had old Cameron to deal with, you'd do just as I did. You see, I didn't know what value he put on me--in fact, I didn't know what value I put on myself. Sometimes I seemed a fine, promising young chap; and other times I seemed about on a level with a Chinaman. It was those infernal books that did it. I think Mrs. Cameron stood to me. At all events, one day Cameron made me tell all my affairs, and then brought in Agnes' name, and finally told me that if I could give a good account of myself in another year he would allow me to write to her. But I must turn over another leaf in the matter of thrift. Of course, I promised anything and everything, and began to feel like a respectable, right-thinking citizen, never considering the thing that was on me.

"This happened on a Saturday morning. Cameron had a habit of finding some work of necessity for Sundays to keep the family out of mischief. He was starting away down the country that afternoon with the two boys to meet some store cattle, not expecting to be back for four or five days, and as I was to start for Hay on the Monday morning we weren't likely to meet again for six months. In the meantime, I was to write to him, but not to Agnes. You'll understand that I had been loafing in the bend for four or five months, and by this time it was well on in winter.

"Now, you'll see what comes of doing things on Sunday that ought to be done the night before. On Sunday morning I went to the smiddy that used to be a mile up the road here to get some keys I had ordered, and I was coming back along the frontage with the keys in my hand, and when I struck the river about half-a-mile above here the first thing that caught my eye was a canoe, with a couple of oars in it, sailing along on its own account. She was a heavy wooden concern about four feet wide and twenty feet long--just a hollow tree, with the right bend dressed into shape, two or three boards nailed across for seats, and a couple of irons like spurs stuck one in each side for you to work the oars in.

"She was travelling within a few yards of this bank, so I peeled off and slipped in and snaked her ashore with a bit of clothes line that was hanging to one end. I tied her up while I went back after my duds. Then I got on board, and came rowing down here, like Trickett himself, and stuck her snout among the roots, just about where Rigby's sitting at the present moment. Of course, the river was twelve or fifteen feet higher than it is now.

"After dinner, nothing would do me but to take Agnes out for a pleasure trip in the canoe. She was on, but her mother was dubious. However, I argued so hard, and lied so fluently about my skill in handling boats that Mrs. Cameron gave in at last, and off we went. It wasn't the first time I had been in a boat, but it was the first time I ever had an oar in my hand, and the new-chum flashness was strong on me. This was about two in the afternoon, and we were to be back in a couple of hours. Of course, I knew Cameron wouldn't allow such Godless recreation if he was at home, but I quieted my conscience with the thought that what the eye never sees, the heart never grieves for."

Thompson paused, sighed heavily, and mechanically felt for his pipe. Then, even in the gloaming, I marked his form assume a resolute, almost arrogant, bearing. The haughty consciousness of self-subdual was more grateful, after all, than even a soul-satisfying smoke; it threw boldness on his forehead, gave firmness to his breath, and he looked like some grim warrior new risen up from death.

Chapter XI.

But now secure the painted vessel glides.
The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides;
While melting music steals upon the sky.
And soften'd sounds along the waters die;
Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play.
Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay.

--Pope's "Rape of the Lock."

THOMPSON resumed. "I just let the boat drift, dipping the oars in a light, off-hand way, to steady her along; and the time passed as pleasantly as time can pass, and quicker than it ever did before, or ever will again. Agnes was even happier than I was, for the whole transaction just came up to her poor little idea of devilment. As it happened, the sun wasn't shining that afternoon, and my watch had gone cronk some weeks before; so I could only guess at the time. But we wanted to be on the safe side, so presently we agreed that it was time to be getting back. Just then we saw a boy putting a night line in the river, and I says to him:

"'I say, sonny,' says I. 'How far back is it to Mr. Cameron's?'

"'Well,' says he. 'I donno how fur it is by the road you come, but you won't do bad if you pad it in five miles. Ain't that Agnes Cameron you got with you?' says he. 'Wonder how they let her come out. I seen Cameron half-an-hour ago.'

"'No,' says I, 'you couldn't. He went away yesterday!'

"'I know he did,' says the boy. 'I seen him and Billy and Malky goin' away yesterday, and I seen him comin' back to-day by his own self. Ought to be home about dark.'

"We were travelling so fast just then that the boy had to yell out his last remarks after us, and by this time we swooped round a point, and lost sight of him. Of course, Agnes began to cry, and, of course, I kissed her; and I remember to the present day that the taste of the poor girl's lips reminded me of dead leeches. But there was no time to be lost, so I welted away with one oar for about a quarter of an hour till I got the boat turned, and then started to send her up against the stream. But she was over a ton weight and she took such a terrific hold of the current that I could hardly gain an inch while I was rowing my best; and, at every fourth lift or so, I used to miss the water and turn a back summerset; and then, while I was getting into position again, she would get the speed on her, and by the time I had steadied her I was heels over tip again. And all this time we were going round one bend after another and evening was coming on full speed. Then I could see that there was nothing for it but to get ashore and walk home, and I told Agnes so. And to make matters better, the poor girl had chilblains, and her Sunday boots punished her so that she had taken them off soon after we started, and now she was tugging and panting and half--swearing to get them on again, but all to no purpose, while I was tumbling over the top of her, and nearly capsizing the boat.

"However, I aimed for a good landing-place, and hit a steep, greasy bank about fifty yards lower down, where Agnes couldn't get out; and altogether by the time we got landed, the night was fairly on us, and it was beginning to rain. When we were landing, I held on to some roots and kept the boat jammed against the bank while Agnes crept out on her hands and knees. Then I let go, and stepped ashore. But clumsy as the boat was, it was lively enough to swing out while I had one foot on the edge of it and the other on the bank. Of course, I plopped into three or four feet of water; and, before I had cleared myself the boat was well out into the main current, and off full tilt for Echuca, with Agnes' boots and shawl and umbrella on board. There was a curse on that boat." The narrator paused in gloomy abstraction, then resumed.

"When we got up on the bank, things looked worse than ever. No appearance of a light anywhere; not even the bark of a dog to be heard; no sign of population; nothing but a wretched red-gum flat, most likely miles across, and cut up in all directions with creeks. However, the first thing to be done was to get out to the main road, so I cheered Agnes up, and gave her my coat and boots, and we made a start together. Naturally, a couple of hundred yards brought us block up against a billabong. We ran it along to the left for a quarter of a mile, and found it joined on with the river. Then we turned back, and ran it half a mile to the right, and found it stuck on to the river, there, too. Of course, we were on an island, and by this time it was pitch dark, and raining cats and dogs. Then I could see that the infernal thing had roused itself, and was fairly on the job. So I was thankful for the very small mercy of a hollow tree, with just enough room in it for Agnes to pack herself as scientifically as a chicken in a clocked egg.

"Next consideration was a fire, so I groped under logs for dry leaves, till I got enough for a commencement. It was a close shave for matches. I had just three left, but they were dry, for the box was a waterproof one. My fingers were numb with cold, so I managed to drop the first match and lose it; but the next was a success. I got the handful of leaves lit, but I had to supply the fire in its infancy with wet stuff, and in spite of all I could do, it dwindled and flickered and died out."

"I'd a give five bob to hear you dealin' with the (adj.) subject," remarked Dixon, complacently.

"You'd have lost your money. I had another match left. I spent a quarter of an hour groping out more dry leaves and twigs. Then I got Agnes' handkerchief for kindling, and made a final attempt. But the match turned out to have no head. I didn't come out. I was past that. I was crushed. It wasn't the hardship, for I've had worse nights, and I expect to have worse still before I die, but it was the troubled mind along with it. And in cases of this kind a girl is as foolish as a foal, so there was Agnes crying and blowing her nose all the time, and wondering whatever she would do; and there was me walking back and forward, with my teeth going like a chaffcutter, and the fine rain for the farmer coming down wholesale where there was no thanks for it. I wouldn't go through it again--not for Father Peter. The hardship was as bad as Dante's Inferno, and the trouble was a lot worse than Milton's Hell."

"Hear, hear," said I, rattling my feet on a root. "Wasn't it worth while to be led into all this unpleasantness by those books, when they repaid you with the power of illustrating it in such a scholarly way?"

"Case of vigilate et (adj.) orate, when a man's in such a (sheol) of a (adj.) st-nk," interjected Dixon, with good-natured emulation, as the last syllable left my lips.

"Go ahead, pile it on!" retorted Thompson, maliciously. "I don't know any surer way of falling in the fat--and I ought to be an authority."

"Let them fill up their measure of iniquity, Steve," remarked the Deacon. "Go on with your story."

"Well," resumed Thompson, "after about three months daylight came, and the rain cleared off. Agnes hadn't felt the cold much, for she had a layer of fat all over her, and her clothes were dry; so she had dropped asleep at the drowsy time in the morning. As soon as it was light enough to see, I had explored the billabong and found one place where the current was middling strong. I tested this spot from bank to bank to make sure of the bottom, and found it was only three to four feet deep. So I got the loan of my boots for the trip, and took Agnes on my shoulder to keep her out of the water, and a good pole in both hands to prop against the current; and I made the passage with about two ounces of strength to spare, for she was 11st. all out--and I was anything but fresh.

"By this time the sun was out nice and warm, and the rest of our journey was easy. We came straight in this direction, thinking to get a shorter cut than the main road. Besides, we felt modest about showing off before the public, for I was bare-footed and bare-headed and wet and miserable--looking, and Agnes' face was dirty and her hair all wild, and her clothes torn, and she was lame with her chilblains, and altogether she looked as if she had been on a bad drunk; and the terror of old Cameron made us both look as if we ought to be in jail, and knew it.

"When we had gone a little better than a mile, we saw a farm house in front of us, and we knew where we were. Agnes was acquainted with the people of the farm, so we decided to give them a call. It was Quarterman's place--two or three miles from here by the road. He's a pompous individual in his own little way. He took on himself to cross-examine me about our misfortune, and he ended by writing a note to Cameron over it. But Mrs. Quarterman did all she could for us, and presently we started off home in a spring cart, with a half-grown lump of a girl to hammer the old moke along. Of course, this girl had to carry the note for Cameron. But now that the adventure was drawing to an end, I found a peace of mind that all the old fogies on the river couldn't disturb. I was as happy as Larry."

"I don't perceive much opening for self-felicitation yet," observed Rigby. "The figure of Cameron seems to loom large in perspective."

"Now, I've told this yarn to three different women, and they all saw the point at a glance," replied Thompson. "But we're dense beggars, the cleverest of us. Anyway, if the idea had struck me before, I would have been proof against all the misery of the night. It just occurred to me that this bit of a mishap would grow into a very good scandal, and that nobody else would have Agnes at any price. My old mistake, forgetting the thing that was on me.

"However, after we got started, I whispered to Agnes, so that Jim couldn't overhear (Jim was the girl's name), 'Agnes,' says I, 'it's a dead certainty that I won't be allowed about your place for some time to come. Now listen and remember. In six or eight months, if I'm alive, I'll come in the night and blaze that big red gum, with the lot of mistletoes on it, just opposite your bedroom window. When you see the fresh blaze, you'll know that I'll be waiting for you that evening at sunset, in the whipstick scrub, at the right-hand lower corner of your calf-paddock. I'll wait there every night for a week.'

"I impressed this on her mind, and cheered her up, and we jogged along to about half-way home, when up comes Cameron behind us on horseback, as savage as a bull-ant. He ordered me out of the spring cart, and I obeyed like clockwork, after giving Jim a half-sovereign for herself. Then, whilst the spring cart went on, Cameron stayed a few minutes, and told me what he thought of me. I took it like a poor man with a large family. I could afford to take it in that way, for I seemed to have a grip that couldn't shake. When he had finished, I went down to my waggon, yoked up, and camped that night twelve miles beyond Quarterman's, and in less than a fortnight I was at Hay, still gloating over my mortgage on Agnes."

"And the books I had recommended--did you master any of them?" I asked.

"No, Tom, I didn't. They mastered me. I gave them to the Public Library at Hay. They reflected a glimpse of credit on me in the end; but, as I told the secretary when he was writing my name and title in the front of each, and complimenting me on my choice of reading--'Stephen Thompson, Esquire,' says I to him, 'has never been the same man since he tackled them!'"

Again Thompson sighed hopelessly, shoved his hand half way down his right-hand pocket, then slowly withdrew it, whilst his whole attitude and demeanor showed that he was vividly realising how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

Chapter XII.

This is the state of man; to-day he puts forth
His tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms.
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;
And--when he thinks, good, easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening--nips his root.

--King Henry VIII., Act III., Scene II.

"DID you keep your appointment with the girl?" asked the Colonel, after a pause.

"Well, Providence took a hand in the arrangement, and I'm not rebellious enough to complain," replied Thompson, with the diseased humility of a self-pitying egotist. "I'll finish the story. It was in June, '73, that I left here, and I came back in February, '74. I had made a splendid season of it--the best I had ever had. The squatters were coining money, and there was no end of new country fresh stocked with sheep in place of cattle; and the grass was good, and I had one of the best teams that ever travelled Riverina. We'll never see such times again. Before Christmas I had cleared 210 notes beyond expenses, and my team nothing the worse. Full loaded both ways every trip, and me grabbing the monish till I could feel my nose growing big and hooked, and my eyes taking the appearance of black beads. I was a man to be avoided.

"During the season I wrote two letters to Cameron, apologising for the other affair, and reporting progress in a modest, off-hand way, but he never answered. So, as I was telling you, I got back in February. I camped about a mile below here and that evening I swam the river with a tomahawk in my teeth, and blazed that big tree--there it is, just opposite. Next evening I was at the corner of the calf-paddock, and who should come pushing through the scrub but Cameron himself.

"'Now, let me hear what you have to say, Thompson,' says he, in an awful voice. 'I'll represent my daughter this evening, if you've no objection.'

"Nothing for it but to face him square, though, in a manner of speaking Agnes seemed to have gone over to the enemy, and I felt like a tree suddenly stripped of every leaf in a hail-storm."

"A vicious combination of metaphor and simile, Steve," remarked the Senator, critically. "Also, the latter seems somewhat exaggeratory. A man with a first-class carrying plant and £210 might be regarded as relatively umbrageous."

"I agree with you there," replied Thompson, bitterly. "However, I found myself able to speak to Cameron in a manly way, and he took it in such good part that I began to think he was making allowance for the purchase I had on Agnes; but it was the old mistake of not allowing for the thing that's on me. So there we stood, while I told him the whole story of my wool season, and when I had done, he canted his head to one side, and says he, 'Do you expect a man of my experience to believe a yarn like THAT?'

"'Well,' says I, 'it does sound a bit hollow, but that's not my fault; the story's true, post to finish.'

"'And it is a fact,' says he, 'that you're got no plant now except nine skeletons and a waggon?'

"'Gospel truth,' says I. 'If you have any doubt about it, you can come to my camp, and see for yourself.'

"'And how much cash have you to the good?' says he.

"'I'll conceal nothing from you, Mr. Cameron,' says I. 'I've just got three-and-fourpence in hand, and I'm about 12 notes in debt; but, against this, I have 36 notes coming from M'Culloch.'

"'Look here, Thompson,' says he, 'if ever I catch you in sight of my place again, I'll put the dogs on you,' and he wheels round and walks off."

"I don't blame him," observed the Major. "Can't you perceive that it requires a higher order of mind than yours to make one substantial structure out of two thin ones, without showing the joint? In fact, your composite style of architecture, though it may make the Washington laugh, cannot but make the Munchausen grieve. Just stand off and look at your two-story yarn. One moment you're clothed in property and cash; the next moment you're sitting at your own slip-panel, full of indigence."

"However, that's my love story, and short as it is, it covers my whole life. No more romance for me. Certainly there's an oldish girl in Moama that I could fall in love with if I let myself loose, but that would be madness for a man in my position. Anybody else might live in hope, but I don't; for the Providence that knows how many hairs a man's got on his head will take thundering good care I don't get off so cheap. I'll live and die on the wallaby. I'm like that character in the Bible--I forget who he was--always going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down in it. I've got the satisfaction of knowing that I deserve it all."

Chapter XIII.

Enter Lucifer as a priest.

--Longfellow's "Golden Legend."

"MOURNFUL is thy tale, son of the car," I observed, thriftlessly using up a good quotation from Ossian. "But you're only passing through the cycle of adversity that every novelist-hero has to fulfil. You'll meet your antithetical affinity yet--some woman with the curse of prosperity on her; and such a woman's alkali, chemically combined with your acid, will fill the goblet of life with a delectable fizzer. Why, this afternoon, when old Fritz spoke of your catching a thirty-pounder, I thought at once, from what I knew of you, that he was referring to some heiress. You'll be a shire--councillor--possibly a churchwarden--before you're done; and one that knows the Law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath had losses, go to; and one that hath two gowns, and everything handsome about him. You'll be a man of acres--like Binney, over there--with a good-natured toleration for the lower classes."

"I don't thank you for the compliment, though Binney's a ten-to-one better man than I am," interrupted Thompson, contentiously. "I'm Berryite to the bone; and Binney's tarred with the same stick as yourself--with this difference, that he's a sound Conservative, and you're a rotten one. He's a good, honest pillar of Conservatism; and you're a sepulchre, whitewashed with Conserv--"

"Is that you, Thompson?" inquired a cheerful voice from the top of the bank.

"What's left of me," replied the bullock driver.

"Stay where you are, Thompson. All fishing? You'll have company, Harold. Why, Collins, is this you?"

"No," I replied, and shook hands with the two-cloud-dropped visitors. Binney was a special friend of mine; a farmer, living just beyond the pub. Harold Lushington, a young Methodist minister, was Binney's brother-in--law. I introduced them to the Colonel, inadvertently omitting to mention Lushington's profession.

"I heard this afternoon that you were camped here," said Binney to Thompson, "so I just came over to tell you that I want to sent away a couple of hundred bags of barley if you'll take it at the current rate. Will you call round to-morrow morning? Right. We'll leave it till then. Harold is on business, too. When he was down at the post this afternoon, the old German told him some fish yarn, and it takes a very small touch to put him off his head on that subject."

"What bait are you using, Collins?" asked Lushington. "I have supplied myself with sheep's lungs."

"No good," remarked Thompson. "Dixon'll give you a roasted mussel if you don't mind going up to the fire for it."

"Thanks," replied the young clergyman; and he hastily climbed the bank.

"Now, I don't want to disturb you, boys," said Binney, who had seated himself on a root. "Go on with your conversation, if it's not private. You were talking of Conservatism, I think."

"The subject of politics was casually glanced at, I remember," replied the Major, "but our topic was the romance of life--the love-story. We had been listening to a most interesting experience of this kind, and my mind had just reverted to a speculation touching a very worthy, though somewhat profane, friend of ours--now gone to prepare a bait. I was busied in conjecture as to what phase the grand passion would be likely to assume in his case. For we must by no means suppose that his unconventional address and seventh-century moral culture, have emancipated him from the common thraldom or tended to make him the exception which is erroneously supposed to prove the rule."

I noticed the respectful air which Binney unconsciously assumed under the glamor of the Judge's perfect enunciation and measured rhetoric. But Thompson nagged in reply:

"You're doing the chap a great injustice, Rigby. Though, to be sure," he added sadly, "there's so much injustice in the world that a little here o