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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rising of the Court, by Henry Lawson
+#6 in our series by Henry Lawson
+
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+Title: The Rising of the Court
+
+Author: Henry Lawson
+
+Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7447]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 1, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RISING OF THE COURT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Geoffrey Cowling
+
+
+
+
+The Rising of the Court, by Henry Lawson
+
+Note: Only the prose stories are reproduced here, not the poetry.
+
+
+The Rising of the Court
+
+
+  Oh, then tell us, Sings and Judges, where our meeting is to be,
+  when the laws of men are nothing, and our spirits all are free
+  when the laws of men are nothing, and no wealth can hold the fort,
+  There'll be thirst for mighty brewers at the Rising of the Court.
+
+
+The same dingy court room, deep and dim, like a well, with the clock
+high up on the wall, and the doors low down in it; with the bench,
+which, with some gilding, might be likened to a gingerbread imitation
+of a throne; the royal arms above it and the little witness box to one
+side, where so many honest poor people are bullied, insulted and
+laughed at by third-rate blackguardly little "lawyers," and so many
+pitiful, pathetic and noble lies are told by pitiful sinners and
+disreputable heroes for a little liberty for a lost self, or for the
+sake of a friend--of a "pal" or a "cobber."  The same overworked
+and underpaid magistrate trying to keep his attention fixed on the
+same old miserable scene before him; as a weary, overworked and
+underpaid journalist or author strives to keep his attention fixed on
+his proofs.  The same row of big, strong, healthy, good-natured
+policemen trying not to grin at times; and the police-court solicitors
+("the place stinks with 'em," a sergeant told me) wrangling over
+some miserable case for a crust, and the "reporters," shabby some of
+them, eager to get a brutal joke for their papers out of the
+accumulated mass of misery before them, whether it be at the expense
+of the deaf, blind, or crippled man, or the alien.
+
+And opposite the bench, the dock, divided by a partition, with the
+women to the left and the men to the right, as it is on the stairs or
+the block in polite society.  They bring children here no longer.  The
+same shaking, wild-eyed, blood-shot-eyed and blear-eyed drunks and
+disorderlies, though some of the women have nerves yet; and the same
+decently dressed, but trembling and conscience-stricken little wretch
+up for petty larceny or something, whose motor car bosses of a big
+firm have sent a solicitor, "manager," or some understrapper here to
+prosecute and give evidence.
+
+But, over there, on a form to one side of the bench-opposite the
+witness box--and as the one bright spot in this dark, and shameful,
+and useless scene--and in a patch of sunlight from the skylight as it
+happens--sit representatives of the Prisoners' Aid Society, Prison
+Gate and Rescue Brigades, etc. (one or two of the ladies in nurses'
+uniforms), who are come to help us and to fight for us against the Law
+of their Land and of ours, God help us!
+
+Mrs Johnson, of Red Rock Lane, is here, and her rival in revolution,
+One-Eyed Kate, and Cock-Eyed Sal, and one or two of the other
+aristocrats of the alley.  And the weeping bedraggled remains of what
+was once, and not so long ago, a pretty, slight, fair-haired and
+blue-eyed Australian girl.  She is up for inciting One-Eyed Kate to
+resist the police.  Also, Three-Pea Ginger, Stousher, and Wingy, for
+some participation in the row amongst the aforementioned ladies.
+(Wingy, by the way, is a ratty little one-armed man, whose case is
+usually described in the head-line, as "A 'Armless Case," by one of
+our great dailies.)  And their pals are waiting outside in the
+vestibule--Frowsy Kate (The Red Streak), Boko Bill, Pincher and his
+"piece," etc., getting together the stuff for the possible fines, and
+the ten-bob fee for the lawyer, in one case, and ready to swear to
+anything, if called upon.  And I myself--though I have not yet entered
+Red Rock Lane Society--on bail, on a charge of "plain drunk."  It
+was "drunk and disorderly" by the way, but a kindly sergeant changed
+it to plain drunk (though I always thought my drunk was ornamental).
+
+Yet I am not ashamed--only comfortably dulled and a little
+tired--dully interested and observant, and hopeful for the sunlight
+presently.  We low persons get too great a contempt for things to feel
+much ashamed at any time; and this very contempt keeps many of us from
+"reforming."  We hear too many lies sworn that we know to be lies,
+and see too many unjust and brutal things done that we know to be
+brutal and unjust.
+
+But let us go back a bit, and suppose we are still waiting for the
+magistrate, and think of Last Night.  "Silence!"--but from no human
+voice this time.  The whispering, shuffling, and clicking of the court
+typewriter ceases, the scene darkens, and the court is blotted out as
+a scene is blotted out from the sight of a man who has thrown himself
+into a mesmeric trance.  And:
+
+Drink--lurid recollection of being "searched"---clang of iron cell
+door, and I grope for and crawl on to the slanting plank.  Period of
+oblivion--or the soul is away in some other world.  Clang of cell
+door again, and soul returns in a hurry to take heed of another soul,
+belonging to a belated drunk on the plank by my side.  Other soul
+says:
+
+"Gotta match?"
+
+So we're not in hell yet.
+
+We fumble and light up.  They leave us our pipes, tobacco and matches;
+presently, one knocks with his pipe on the iron trap of the door and
+asks for water, which is brought in a tin pint-pot.  Then follow
+intervals of smoking, incoherent mutterings that pass for
+conversation, borrowings of matches, knockings with the pannikin on
+the cell door wicket or trap for more water, matches, and bail; false
+and fitful starts into slumber perhaps--or wild attempts at flight on
+the part of our souls into that other world that the sober and sane
+know nothing of; and, gradually, suddenly it seems, reason (if this
+world is reasonable) comes back.
+
+"What's your trouble!"
+
+"Don't know.  Bomb outrage, perhaps."
+
+"Drunk?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What's yours!"
+
+"Same boat."
+
+But presently he is plainly uneasy (and I am getting that way, too, to
+tell the truth), and, after moving about, and walking up and down in
+the narrow space as well as we can, he "rings up" another policeman,
+who happens to be the fat one who is to be in charge all night.
+
+"Wot's up here?"
+
+"What have I been up to?"
+
+"Killin' a Chinaman.  Go to sleep."
+
+Policeman peers in at me inquiringly, but I forbear to ask questions.
+
+Blankets are thrown in by a friend of mine in the force, though we
+are not entitled to them until we are bailed or removed to the
+"paddock"  (the big drunks' dormitory and dining cell at the
+Central), and we proceed to make ourselves comfortable.  My mate
+wonders whether he asked them to send to his wife to get bail, and
+hopes he didn't.
+
+They have left our wicket open, seeing, or rather hearing, that we are
+quiet.  But they have seemingly left some other wickets open also, for
+from a neighbouring cell comes the voice of Mrs Johnson holding forth.
+The locomotive has apparently just been run into the cleaning sheds,
+and her fires have not had time to cool.  They say that Mrs Johnson
+was a "lady once," like many of her kind; that she is not a "bad
+woman"--that is, not a woman of loose character--but gets money sent
+to her from somewhere--from her "family," or her husband, perhaps.
+But when she lets herself loose--or, rather, when the beer lets her
+loose--she is a tornado and a terror in Red Rock Lane, and it is only
+her fierce, practical kindness to her unfortunate or poverty-stricken
+sisters in her sober moments that keeps her forgiven in that classic
+thoroughfare.  She can certainly speak "like a lady" when she likes,
+and like an intelligent, even a clever, woman--not like a "woman of
+the world," but as a woman who knew and knows the world, and is in
+hell.  But now her language is the language of a rough shearer in a
+"rough shed" on a blazing hot day.
+
+After a while my mate calls out to her:
+
+"Oh! for God's sake give it a rest!"
+
+Whereupon Mrs Johnson straightway opens on him and his ancestry, and
+his mental, moral, and physical condition--especially the latter.  She
+accuses him of every crime known to Christian countries and some
+Asiatic and ancient ones.  She wants to know how long he has been out
+of jail for kicking his wife to pieces that time when she was up as a
+witness against him, and whether he is in for the same thing again?
+(She has never set eyes on him, by the way, nor he on her.)
+
+He calls back that she is not a respectable woman, and he knows all
+about her.
+
+Thereupon she shrieks at him and bangs and kicks at her door, and
+demands his name and address.  It would appear that she is a
+respectable woman, and hundreds can prove it, and she is going to make
+him prove it in open court.
+
+He calls back that his name is Percy Reginald Grainger, and his town
+residence is "The Mansions," Macleay Street, next to Mr Isaacs, the
+magistrate, and he also gives her the address of his solicitor.
+
+She bangs and shrieks again, and states that she will get his name
+from the charge sheet in the morning and have him up for criminal
+libel, and have his cell mate up as a witness--and hers, too.  But
+just here a policeman comes along and closes her wicket with a bang
+and cuts her off, so that her statements become indistinct, or come
+only as shrieks from a lost soul in an underground dungeon.  He also
+threatens to cut us off and smother us if we don't shut up.  I wonder
+whether they've got her in the padded cell.
+
+We settle down again, but presently my fellow captive nudges me and
+says: "Listen!"  From another cell comes the voice of a woman
+singing--the girl who is in for "inciting to resist, your worship,"
+in fact.  "Listen!" he says, "that woman could sing once."  Her
+voice is low and sweet and plaintive, as of a woman who had been a
+singer but had lost her voice.  And what do you think it is?
+
+  The crowd in accents hushed reply--
+  "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by."
+
+Mrs Johnson's cell is suddenly silent.  Then, not mimickingly,
+mockingly, or scornfully, but as if the girl is a champion of Jesus
+of Nazareth, and is hurt at the ignorance of the multitude, and pities
+_Him_:
+
+  Now who is this Jesus of Nazareth, say?
+
+The policeman, coming along the passage, closes the wicket in her door,
+but softly this time, and not before we catch the  plaintive words
+again.
+
+  The crowd in accents hushed reply
+  "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by."
+
+My fellow felon throws the blanket off him impatiently, sits up with a
+jerk, and gropes for his pipe.
+
+"God!" he says.  "But this is red hot!  Have you got another
+match?"
+
+I wonder what the Nazarene would have to say about it.
+
+Sleep for a while.  I wonder whether they'll give us time, or we'll be
+able to sleep some of our sins off in the end, as we sleep our drink
+off here?  Then "The Paddock" and day light; but there's little time
+for the Paddock here, for we must soon be back in court.  The men
+borrow and lend and divide tobacco, lend even pipes, while some break
+up hard tobacco and roll cigarettes with bits of newspaper.  If it is
+Sunday morning, even those who have no hope for bail, and have long
+horrible day and night before them, will sometimes join in a cheer as
+the more fortunate are bailed.  But the others have tea and bread and
+butter brought to them by one of the Prisoners' Aid Societies, who ask
+for no religion in return.  They come to save bodies, and not to fish
+for souls.  The men walk up and down and to and fro, and cross and
+recross incessantly, as caged men and animals always do--and as some
+uncaged men do too.
+
+"Any of you gentlemen want breakfast?"  Those who have money and
+appetites order; some order for the sake of the tea alone; and some
+"shout" two or three extra breakfasts for those who had nothing on
+them when they were run in.  We low people can be very kind to each
+other in trouble.  But now it's time to call us out by the lists,
+marshal us up in the passage and draft us into court.  Ladies first.
+But I forgot that I am out on bail, and that the foregoing belongs to
+another occasion.  Or was it only imagination, or hearsay?
+Journalists have got themselves run in before now, in order to see and
+hear and feel and smell for themselves--and write.
+
+
+"Silence!  Order in the Court."  I come like a shot out of my
+nightmare, or trance, or what you will, and we all rise as the
+magistrate takes his seat.  None of us noticed him come in, but he's
+there, and I've a quaint idea that he bowed to his audience.  Kindly,
+humorous Mr Isaacs, whom we have lost, always gave me that idea.  And,
+while he looks over his papers, the women seem to group themselves,
+unconsciously as it were, with Mrs Johnson as front centre, as though
+they depended on her in some vague way.  She has slept it off and
+tidied, or been tidied, up, and is as clear-headed as she ever will
+be.  Crouching directly behind her, supported and comforted on one
+side by One-Eyed Kate, and on the other by Cock-Eyed Sal, is the poor
+bedraggled little resister of the Law, sobbing convulsively, her
+breasts and thin shoulders heaving and shaking under her openwork
+blouse--the girl who seemed to pity Jesus of Nazareth last night in
+her cell.  There's very little inciting to resist about her now.  Most
+women can cry when they like, I know, and many have cried men to jail
+and the gallows; but here in this place, if a woman's tears can avail
+her anything, who, save perhaps a police-court solicitor and
+gentleman-by-Act-of-Parliament, would, or dare, raise a sneer.
+
+I wonder what the Nazarene would have to say about it if He came in
+to speak for her.  But probably they'd send Him to the receiving
+house as a person of unsound mind, or give Him worse punishment for
+drunkenness and contempt of court.
+
+His Worship looks up.
+
+Mrs Johnson (from the dock): "Good morning, Mr Isaacs.  How do you
+do?  You're looking very well this morning, Mr Isaacs."
+
+His Worship (from the Bench): "Thank you, Mrs Johnson.  I'm feeling
+very well this, morning."
+
+There's a pause, but there is no "laughter."  The would-be satellites
+don't know whom the laugh might be against.  His Worship bends over
+the papers again, and I can see that he is having trouble with that
+quaintly humorous and kindly smile, or grin, of his.  He has as hard
+a job to control his smile and get it off his face as some magistrates
+have to get a smile on to theirs.  And there's a case coming by and
+by that he'll have to look a bit serious over.  However--
+
+"Jane Johnson!"
+
+Mrs Johnson is here present, and reminds the Sergeant that she is.
+
+Then begins, or does begin in most courts, the same dreary old drone,
+like the giving out of a hymn, of the same dreary old charge:
+
+"You -- Are -- Charged -- With -- Being -- Drunk -- And -- Disorderly
+-- In -- Such -- And -- Such -- A -- Street -- How -- Do -- You --
+Plead -- Guilty -- Or -- Not -- Guilty?"  But they are less orthodox
+here.  The "disorderly" has dropped out of Mrs Johnson's charge
+somehow, on the way from the charge room.  I don't know what has been
+going on behind the scenes, but, anyway, it is Christmas-time, and the
+Sergeant seems anxious to let Mrs Johnson off lightly.  It means
+anything from twenty-four hours or five shillings to three months on
+the Island for her.  The lawyers and the police--especially the
+lawyers--are secretly afraid of Mrs Johnson.
+
+However, again---
+
+The Sergeant: "This woman has not been here for six weeks, your
+Worship."
+
+Mrs Johnson (who has him set and has been waiting for him for a year
+or so): "It's a damned lie, Mr Isaacs.  I was here last Wednesday!"
+Then, after a horrified pause in the Court: "But I beg _your_
+pardon, Mr Isaacs."
+
+His Worship's head goes down again.  The "laughter" doesn't come
+here, either.  There is a whispered consultation, and (it being
+Christmas-time) they compromise with Mrs Johnson for "five shillings
+or the risin'," and she thanks his Worship and is escorted out,
+rather more hurriedly than is comportable with her dignity, for she
+remarks about it.
+
+The members of the Johnsonian sisterhood have reason to be thankful
+for the "lift" she has given them, for they all get off lightly, and
+even the awful resister of Law-an'-order is forgiven.  Mrs Johnson has
+money and is waiting outside to stand beers for them; she always
+shouts for the boys when she has it.  And--what good does it all do?
+
+It is very hard to touch the heart of a woman who is down, though they
+are intensely sympathetic amongst themselves.  It is nearly as hard as
+it is to combat the pride of a hard-working woman in poverty.  It was
+such women as Mrs Johnson, One-Eyed Kate, and their sisters who led
+Paris to Versailles; and a King and a Queen died for it.  It is such
+women as Mrs Johnson and One-Eyed Kate and their sisters who will lead
+a greater Paris to a greater Versailles some day, and many "Trust"
+kings and queens, and their princes and princesses shall die for it.
+And that reminds me of two reports in a recent great daily:
+
+  Miss Angelina De Tapps, the youngest daughter of the well-known
+  great family of brewers, was united in the holy bonds of matrimony
+  to Mr Reginald Wells--(here follows a long account of the smart
+  society wedding).  The happy pair leave en route for Europe per the
+  --- next Friday.
+
+  Jane Johnson, an old offender, again faced the music before Mr
+  Isaacs, S.M., at the Central yesterday morning--(here follows a
+  "humorous" report of the case).
+
+Next time poor Mrs Johnson will leave _en route_ for "Th'
+Island" and stay there three months.
+
+The sisters join Mrs Johnson, who has some money and takes them to a
+favourite haunt and shouts for them--as she does for the boys
+sometimes.  Their opinions on civilization are not to be printed.
+
+Ginger and Wingy get off with the option, and, though the fine is
+heavy, it is paid.  They adjourn with Boko Bill, and their politics
+are lurid.
+
+Squinny Peters (plain drunk--five bob or the risin'), who is peculiar
+for always paying his fine, elects to take it out this time.  It
+appears that the last time Squinny got five bob or the risin' he
+ante'd up the splosh like a man, and the court rose immediately, to
+Squinny's intense disgust.  He isn't taking any chances this time.
+
+Wild-Flowers-Charley, who recently did a fortnight, and has been out
+on bail, has had a few this morning, and, in spite of warnings from
+and promises to friends, insists on making a statement, though by
+simply pleading guilty he might get off easily.  The statement lasts
+some ten minutes.  Mr Isaacs listens patiently and politely and
+remarks:
+
+"Fourteen days."
+
+Charley saw the humour of it afterwards, he says.
+
+But what good does it all do?
+
+I had no wish to treat drunkenness frivolously in beginning this
+sketch; I have seen women in the horrors--that ought to be enough.
+
+
+
+
+"ROLL UP AT TALBRAGAR"
+
+  Jack Denver died at Talbragar when Christmas Eve began,
+  And there was sorrow round the place, for Denver was a man;
+  Jack Denver's wife bowed down her head--her daughter's grief was wild,
+  And big Ben Duggan by the bed stood sobbing like a child.
+  But big Ben Duggan saddled up, and galloped fast and far,
+  To raise the longest funeral ever seen on Talbragar.
+
+                                              -_Ben Duggan_.
+
+
+Both funerals belonged to Big Ben Duggan in a way, though Jack Denver
+was indirectly the cause of both.
+
+Jack Denver was reckoned the most popular man in the district (outside
+the principal township)--a white man and a straight man--a white boss
+and a straight sportsman.  He was a squatter, though a small one; a
+real squatter who lived on his run and worked with his men--no dummy,
+super, manager for a bank, or swollen cockatoo about Jack Denver.  He
+was on the committees at agricultural shows and sports, great at
+picnics and dances, beloved by school children at school feasts (I
+wonder if they call them feasts still), giver of extra or special
+prizes, mostly sovs. and half-sovs., for foot races, etc.; leading
+spirit for the scrub district in electioneering campaigns--they went
+as right as men could go in the politics of those days who watched and
+went the way Jack Denver went; header of subscription lists for
+burnt-out, flooded-out, sick, hurt, dead or killed or otherwise
+knocked-out selectors and others, or their families; barracker and
+agitator for new provisional schools, assister of his Reverence and
+little bush chapels, friend of all manner of wanderers--careless,
+good-hearted scamps in trouble, broken-hearted new chums, wrecks and
+failures and outcasts of any colour or creed, and especially of old
+King Jimmy and the swiftly vanishing remnant of his tribe.  His big
+slab-and-shingle and brick-floored kitchen, with its skillions, built
+on more generous plans and specifications than even the house itself,
+was the wanderer's goal and home in bad weather.  And--yes, owner, on
+a small scale, of racehorses, and a keen sportsman.
+
+Jack Denver and Big Ben Duggan were boys together on the old
+selections, and at the new provisional bark school at Pipeclay; they
+went into the Great North-West together "where all the rovers
+go"--stock-riding and droving and overlanding, and came back after a
+few years bronzed and seasoned and with wild yarns.
+
+Jack married and settled down on a small run his father had bought
+near Talbragar, and his generous family of tall, straight bush boys
+and tall, straight bush girls grew up and had their sweethearts.  But,
+when Jack married, Big Ben Duggan went back again, up into Queensland
+and the Great North-West, with a makeshift mate who had also lost his
+mate through marriage.  Ever and again, after one, and two, and three
+years--the periods of absence lengthening as the years went on--Big
+Ben Duggan would come back home, and stay a while (till the Great
+North-West began to call insistently) at Denver's, where he would be
+welcomed jubilantly by all--even the baby who had never seen him--for
+there was "something about the man."  And, until late on the night
+of his return, he and Jack would sit by the fire in winter, or outside
+on the woodheap in summer, and yarn long and fondly about the Wide
+Places, and strange things they knew and understood.
+
+How sudden things are!  Ben was back (just in time for the holidays
+and the Mudgee races) out of the level lands, where distance dwells in
+her halls of shimmering haze, after following her for five years.
+
+They were riding home from the races, the women and children in carts
+and buggies, the men and boys on horseback--of course.  They raced
+each other along the road, across short cuts, through scrub and
+timber, and back to the slow-coming overloaded vehicles again, some
+riding wildly and recklessly.  Jack Denver was amongst them, his heart
+warmed with good luck at the races, good whisky to wet it, and the
+return of his old mate.  "We're as good as the best of the young 'uns
+yet, Ben!" he cried, as they swung through the trees.  "Ain't we,
+you old ---?"
+
+And then and there it happened.
+
+A new chum suggested that Jack had more than he thought aboard and was
+thrown from his horse; but the new chum was repudiated with scorn and
+bad words and indignation by bushmen and bushwomen alike--as indeed he
+would be by any bushman who had seen a drunken rider ride.
+
+"I learnt him to ride when he was a kiddy about so high," said old
+Break-the-News Fosbery, resentfully gasping and gulping, "and Jack
+wasn't thrown."  It was thought at first that his horse had shied and
+run him against a tree, or under an overhanging branch; but Ben Duggan
+had seen it, and explained the thing to the doctor with that strange
+calmness or quietness that comes to men in the midst of a life's
+grief.  Jack was riding loosely, and swung forward just as the filly,
+a fresh young thing, threw back her head; and it struck him with
+sledge-hammer force, full in the face.
+
+He was dead, even before they got him to Anderson's Halfway Inn.
+There was wild racing back to town for doctors, and some accidents;
+one horse was killed and another ridden to death.  Others went as a
+forlorn hope in search of Doc. Wild, eccentric Yankee bush "quack,"
+who had once saved one of Denver's little girls from diphtheria;
+others, again, for Peter M'Laughlan, bush missionary, to face the
+women--for they couldn't.
+
+Big Ben Duggan, blubbering unashamed by the bedside, put his hand on
+Mrs Denver's shoulder, as she crouched there, wild-eyed, like a hunted
+thing.  "Nev--never mind, Mrs Denver!"  he blurted out, with a note
+as of indignation and defiance--just for all the world as if Jack
+Denver had done a wrong thing and the district was down on
+him--"he'll have the longest funeral ever seen in these parts!  Leave
+that to me."  Then some of the women took her out to her daughter's.
+Big Ben Duggan gave terse instructions to some of the young riders
+about, and then, taking the best and freshest horse, the cross-country
+scrub swallowed him--west.  The young men jumped on their horses and
+rode, fan-like, east.
+
+They took Jack Denver home.  They always took their dead home first,
+whenever possible, and no matter the distance, before taking them to
+their last long home; and they do it yet, I suppose.  They are not
+always so particular about it in cities, from what I've seen.
+
+But this was a strange funeral.  They had arranged mattress and sheet
+in the bottom of a four-wheeler, and covered him with sheet, blanket,
+and quilt, though the weather was warm; and over the body, from side
+to side of the trap, they had stretched the big dark-green table-cloth
+from Anderson's dining-room.  The long, ghostly, white, cleared
+government road between the dark walls of timber in the moonlight.
+The buggies and carts behind, and the dead-white faces and glistening
+or despairingly staring eyes of the women--wife, daughters, and
+nieces, and those who had come to help and comfort.  The men--sons and
+brothers, and few mates and chums and sweethearts--riding to right and
+left like a bodyguard, to comfort and be comforted who needed comfort.
+
+Now and again a brother or son--mostly a brother--riding close to the
+wheel, would suddenly throw out his arm on the mud splasher, of buggy
+or cart, and, laying his head on it, sob as he rode, careless of tyre
+and spokes, till a woman pushed him off gently:
+
+"Take care of the wheel, Jim--mind the wheel."
+
+The eldest son held the most painful position, by his mother's side in
+the first buggy, supported by an aunt on the other side, while
+somebody led his horse.  In the next buggy, between two daughters, sat
+a young fellow who was engaged to one of them--they were to be married
+after the holidays.  The poor girls were white and worn out; he had an
+arm round each, and now and again they rested their heads on his
+shoulders.  The younger girl would sleep by fits and starts, the sleep
+of exhaustion, and start up half laughing and happy, to be stricken
+wild-eyed the next moment by terrible reality.  Some couldn't realize
+it at all--and to most of them all things were very dreamy, unreal and
+far away on that lonely, silent road in the moonlight--silent save for
+the slow, stumbling hoofs of tired horses, and the deliberate,
+half-hesitating clack-clack of wheel-boxes on the axles.
+
+Ben Duggan rode hard, as grief-stricken men ride--and walk.  At Cooyal
+he woke up the solitary storekeeper and told him the news; then along
+that little-used old road for some miles both ways, and back again,
+rousing prospectors and fossickers, the butcher of the neighbourhood,
+clearers, fencers, and timber-getters, in hut and tent.
+
+"Who's that?"
+
+"What's up?"
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"Ben Duggan!  Jack Denver's dead!  Killed ridin' home from the races!
+Funeral's to-morrow.  Roll up at Talbragar or the nearest point you
+can get to on the government road.  Tell the neighbours and folks."
+
+"Good God!  How did it happen?"
+
+But the hoofs of Ben's horse would be clattering or thudding away
+into the distance.
+
+He struck through to Dunne's selection--his brother-in-law, who had
+not been to the races; then to Ross's farm--Old Ross was against
+racing, but struck a match at once and said something to his auld wife
+about them black trousers that belonged to the black coat and vest.
+
+Then Ben swung to the left and round behind the spurs to the school at
+Old Pipeclay, where he told the schoolmaster.  Then west again to
+Morris's and Schneider's lonely farms in the deep estuary of Long
+Gully, and through the gully to the Mudgee-Gulgong road at New
+Pipeclay.  The long, dark, sullenly-brooding gully through which he
+had gone to school in the glorious bush sunshine with Jack Denver, and
+his sweetheart--now but three hours his hopelessly-stricken widow;
+Bertha Lambert, Ben's sweetheart--married now, and newly a
+grandmother; Harry Dale--drowned in the Lachlan; Lucy Brown--Harry's
+school-day and boy-and-girl sweetheart--dead; and--and all the rest of
+them.  Far away, far away--and near away: up in Queensland and out on
+the wastes of the Never-Never.  Riding and camping, hardship and
+comfort, monotony and adventure, drought, flood, blacks, and fire;
+sprees and--the rest of it.  Long dry stretches on Dead Man's Track.
+Cutting across the country in No Man's Land where there were no tracks
+into the Unknown.  Chancing it and damning it.  Ill luck and good
+luck.  Laughing at it afterwards and joking at it always; he and
+Jack--always he and Jack--till Jack got married.  The children used to
+say Long Gully was haunted, and always hurried through it after
+sunset.  It was haunted enough now all right.
+
+But, raising the gap at the head of the gully, he woke suddenly and
+came back from the hazy, lazy plains; the
+
+  Level lands where Distance hides in her halls of shimmering haze,
+  And where her toiling dreamers ride towards her all their days;
+
+where "these things" are ever far away, and Distance ever near--and
+whither he had drifted, the last hour, with Jack Denver, from the old
+Slab School.
+
+"I wonder whether old Fosbery's got through yet?" he muttered, with
+nervous anxiety, as he looked down on the cluster of farms and
+scattered fringe of selections in the broad moonlight.  "I wonder if
+he's got there yet?"  Then, as if to reassure himself: "He must have
+started an hour before me, and the old man can ride yet."  He rode
+down towards a farm on Pipeclay Creek, about the centre of the cluster
+of farms, vineyards, and orchards.
+
+Old Fosbery--otherwise Break-the-News--was a character round there.
+If he was handy and no woman to be had, he was always sent to break
+the news to the wife of a digger or bushman who had met with an
+accident.  He was old, and world-wise, and had great tact--also great
+experience in such matters.  Bad news had been broken to him so many
+times that he had become hardened to it, and he had broken bad news so
+often that he had come to take a decided sort of pleasure in it--just
+as some bushman are great at funerals and will often travel miles to
+advise, and organize, and comfort, and potter round a burying and are
+welcomed.  They had broken the news to old Fosbery when his boy went
+wrong and was "taken" ("when they took Jim").  They had broken the
+news to old Fosbery when his daughter, Rose, went wrong, and bolted
+with Flash Jack Redmond.  They had broken the news to the old man when
+young Ted was thrown from his horse and killed.  They had broken the
+news to the old man when the unexpected child of his old age and hopes
+was accidentally burnt to death.  So the old man knew how it felt.
+
+
+The farm was the home of one of Jack Denver's married sisters, and, as
+there was no woman to go so far in the night they had sent old Fosbery
+to tell her.  Folks were most uneasy and anxious, by the way, when
+they saw old Fosbery coming unexpectedly, and sometimes some of them
+got a bad start--but it helped break the news.
+
+"Well, if he ain't there, I suppose I'll have to do it," thought Ben
+as he passed quietly through the upper sliprails and neared the house.
+"The old man might have knocked up or got drunk after all.  Anyway,
+no one might come in the morning till it's too late--it always happens
+that way--and--besides, the women'll want time to look up their black
+things."
+
+But, turning the corner of the cow-yard, he gave a sigh of relief as
+he saw old Fosbery's horse tied up.  They were up, and the big kitchen
+lighted; he caught a glimpse of a shock of white hair and bushy white
+eyebrows that could have belonged to no one except old Break-the-News.
+They were sitting at the table, the tearful wife pouring out tea, and
+by the tokens Ben knew that old Fosbery had been very successful.  He
+rode quietly to the lower sliprails, let them down softly, led his
+horse carefully over them, put them up cautiously, and stood in a main
+road again.  He paused to think, leaning one arm on his saddle and
+tickling the nape of his neck with his little finger; his jaw dropped,
+reflecting and grief forgotten in the business on hand, and the horse
+"gave" to him, thinking he was about to mount.  He was tired--weary
+with that strange energetic weariness that cannot rest.  It was five
+miles from Mudgee and the news was known there and must have spread a
+bit already; but the bulk of the Gulgong and Gulgong Road race-goers
+had passed here before the accident.  Anyway, he thought he might as
+well go over and tell old Buckolts, of the big vineyard, across the
+creek, who was a great admirer of Jack Denver and had been drinking
+with him at the races that day.  Old Buckolts was a man of weight in
+the district, and was always referred to by all from his old wife
+down, as "der boss," and by no other term.  The old slab farmhouse
+and skillions and out-houses, and the new square brick house built in
+front, were all asleep in the moonlight.  The dogs woke the old man
+first (as was generally the case), as Ben opened the big white home
+gate and passed through without dismounting.
+
+"Who's dat?  Who voss die [there]?" shouted the old man as the
+horse's hoofs crunched on the white creek-bed gravel between the two
+houses.
+
+"Ben Duggan!"
+
+"Vot voss der matter?"
+
+"Jack Denver's dead--killed riding home from the races."
+
+"Vot dat you say?"
+
+Ben repeated.
+
+"Go avay!  Go home and go to sleep!  You voss shoking--and trunk.
+Vat for you gum by my house mit a seely cock mit der bull shtory at
+dis hour of der night?"
+
+"It's only too true, Mr Buckolts," said Ben.  "I wish to God it
+wasn't."
+
+"You've got der yoomps, Pen.  Go to der poomp and poomp on your head
+and den turn in someveers till ter morning.  I tells von of der pot's
+to gif you a nip and show you a poonk.  Vy!  I trink mit Shack Denver
+not twelf hour ago!"
+
+But Ben persisted: "I'm not drunk, Mr Buckolts, and I ain't got the
+horrors--I wish to God I was an' had.  Poor Jack was killed near
+Anderson's, riding home, about six o'clock."
+
+Though Ben couldn't see him, he could feel and hear by his tones,
+that old Buckolts sat up in bed suddenly.
+
+"_Mein Gott_!  How did it happen, Pen?"
+
+Ben told him.
+
+"Ven and veer voss der funeral?"
+
+Ben told him.
+
+"Frett!  Shonny!  Villie!  Sharley!" shouted the old man at the top
+of his voice to the boys sleeping in the old house.  "Get up and
+pring all der light horses in from der patticks, and gif dem a goot
+feet mit plenty corn; and get der double-parrelled puggy ant der
+sinkle puggy and der three spring carts retty.  Dere vill pe peoples
+vanting lifts to-morrow.  Ant get der harnesses and sattles retty.
+Vake up, olt vomans!"  (Mrs Buckolts must have been awake by this
+time.)  "Call der girls ant see to dere plack tresses.  Py Gott, ve
+_moost_ do dis thing in style.  Does his poor sister know over
+dere across the creeks, Pen?  Durn out! you lazy, goot-for-noddings,
+or I will chain you up on an ants' bed mit a rope like a tog; do you
+not hear that Shack Denver voss dett?"
+
+"I vill sent some of der girls over dere first thing in der
+morning.  Holt on, Pen, ant I vill sent you out some vine."
+
+Ben rode with the news to Lee's farm where Maurice Lee--at feud with
+Buckolts and a silent man--was, for he had known Denver all his life,
+and had gone, in his young days, on a long droving trip with him and
+Ben Duggan.
+
+A little later Ben returned to the main road on a fresh horse.  He
+turned towards Gulgong, and rode hard; past the new bark provisional
+school and along the sidings.  He left the news at Con O'Donnell's
+lonely tin grocery and sly-grog shop, perched on the hillside--("God
+forgive us all!" said Con O'Donnell).  He left the news at the
+tumble-down public-house, among the huts and thistles and goats that
+were left of the Log Paddock Rush.  There were goats on the veranda
+and the place seemed dead; but there were startled replies and
+inquiries and matches struck.  He left the news at Newton's selection,
+and Old Bones Farm, and at Foley's at the foot of Lowe's Peak, close
+under the gap between Peak and Granite Ridge.  Then he turned west, at
+right angles to the main road, and took a track that was deserted
+except for one farm and on every alternate Sunday.  He passed the
+lonely little slab bush "chapel" of the locality, that broke
+startlingly out of the scrub by the track side as he reached it; and
+left the news at Southwick's farm at the end of the blind track.  At
+more than one farm he left the bushwoman hurriedly looking up her
+"black things;" and at more than one, one of the boys getting his
+bridle to catch his horse and ride elsewhere with the news.
+
+Ben rode back, through the moonlight and the moon-shadow haunted
+paddocks, and the naked, white, ringbarked trees, along Snakes Creek,
+parallel with the main road he had recently travelled till he struck
+Pipeclay Creek again lower down.  He turned down the track towards the
+river, and at the junction left word at Lowe's--one of the old
+land-grant families.  The dogs woke an old handy man (who had been
+"sent out" in past ages for "knocking a donkey off a hen-roost"-as
+most of them were) and Ben told him to tell the family.
+
+At Belinfante's Bridge across the Cudgegong Ben struck a big camp of
+bullock-drivers, some going down with wool and some going back for
+more.
+
+"Hold on, Ben," cried Jimmy Nowlett, from his hammock under his
+wagon as Ben was riding off--"Hold on a minute! I want to look at
+yer."
+
+Jimmy got his head out of his bunk very cautiously and carefully, and
+his body after it--there were nut ends of bolts, a heavy axle, and
+extremely hard projections, points, and corners within a very few
+short inches of his chaff-filled sugar-bag pillow.  Slipping cannily
+on to his hands and knees, he crawled out under the tail-board,
+dragging his "moles" after him, and stood outside in the moonlight
+shaking himself into his trousers.
+
+Jimmy was a little man who always wore a large size in moleskins--for
+some reason best known to himself--or more probably for no reason at
+all; or because of a habit he'd got into accidentally years ago--or
+because of the motherly trousers his mother used to build for him when
+he was a boy.  And he always shook himself into his pants after the
+manner of a woman shaking a pillow into a clean slip; his chin down on
+his chest and his jaw dropped, as if he'd take himself in his teeth,
+after the manner of the woman with a pillow, were he not prevented by
+sound anatomical reasons.
+
+"You look reg'lerly tuckered out, Ben,"  he said, "an' yer horse
+could do with a spell too.  Git down, man, and have a pint er tea and
+a bite."
+
+Ben got down wearily and knew at once how knocked up he was.  He sat
+right down on the hard ground, embracing and drawing up his knees, and
+felt as if he'd like never to get up again: while Jimmy shook some
+chaff and corn that he carried for his riding hack into a box for the
+horse, and his travelling mate, Billy Grimshaw, lifted his big
+namesake half full of cold tea, on to the glowing coals by the burning
+log--looking just like an orang-outang in a Crimean shirt.
+
+Ben got a fresh horse at Alfred Gentle's farm under the shadow of
+Granite Ridge, and then on to Canadian (th' Canadian Lead of the
+roaring days), which had been saved from the usual fate by becoming a
+farming township.  Here he roused and told the storekeeper.  Then up
+the creek to Home Rule, dreariest of deserted diggings.
+
+He struck across the ages-haunted bush, and up Chinaman's Creek, past
+"the Chinamen's Graves," and through the scrub and over the ridges
+for the Talbragar Road.  For he had to see Jack Denver home from start
+to finish.
+
+Glaring, hot and dusty, lay the long, white road; coated with dust
+that felt greasy to the touch and taste.  The coffin was in a
+four-wheeled trap, for the solitary hearse that Mudgee boasted then
+was to meet them some three miles out of town--at the racecourse, as
+it happened, by one of those eternal ironies of fate.  (Jones, the
+undertaker, had had another job that morning.) The long string of
+buggies and carts and horsemen; other buggies and carts and horsemen
+drawn respectfully back amongst the trees here and there along the
+route; male hats off and held rigidly vertical with right ears as the
+coffin passed; and drivers waiting for a chance to draw into the line.
+
+Think of it; up early on the first morning, a long day at the races, a
+long journey home, awake and up all night with grief and sympathy.
+Some of the men had ridden till daylight; the women, worn out and
+exhausted, had perhaps an hour or so of sleep towards morning--yet
+they were all there, except Ben Duggan, on the long, hot, dusty road
+back, heads swimming in the heat and faces and hands coated with
+perspiration and dust--and never, never once breaking out of a slow
+walk.  It would have been the same had it been pouring with rain.  I
+have seen funerals trotting fast in London, and they are trotting more
+and more in Australian cities, with only "the time" for an excuse.
+But in the bush I have never seen a funeral faster than the slowest of
+walks no matter who or what might wait, or what might happen or be
+lost.  They stood by their dead well out there.  Maybe some of the
+big, simple souls had a sort of vague idea that the departed would
+stand a better show if accompanied as far as possible by the greatest
+possible number of friends--"barrackers," so to speak.
+
+Here all the shallow and involuntary sham of it, the shirking of a
+dull and irksome duty--a bore, though the route be only a mile or so.
+The satisfied undertaker, and the hard-up professional mutes and
+mourners in seedy, mouldy, greeny-black, and with boozers' faces and
+noses and a constant craving for beer to help them bear up against
+their grief and keep their mock solemn faces.  Out there you were
+carried to the hearse or trap from your home, and from the hearse or
+trap to your grave--and with infinite carefulness and gentleness--on
+the shoulders of men, and of men who had known and loved you.
+
+There had been wonder and waiting in the morning for Ben Duggan; and
+the women especially, on the way home, when free from restraint, were
+greatly indignant against him.  To think that he should break out and
+go on the drunk on this day of all days, when his oldest mate and
+friend was being carried to his grave.  The men, knowing how he had
+ridden all night, found great excuses; but later on some grew anxious
+and wondered what could have become of him.
+
+Some, returning home by a short cut, passed over Dead Man's Gap beyond
+Lowe's Peak.
+
+"Wonder what could have become of Ben Duggan."  mused one, as they
+rode down.
+
+There and then their wonders ceased.
+
+A party of road-clearers had been at work along the bottom, and there
+was much smoke from the burning-off, which must have made the track
+dim and vague and uncertain at night.  Just at the foot of the gap,
+clear of the rough going, a newly-fallen tree lay across the track.
+It was stripped--had been stripped late the previous afternoon, in
+fact; and, well, you won't know, what a log like that is when the sap
+is well up until you have stepped casually on to it to take a look
+round.  A confident skip, with your boot soles well greased, on to the
+ice in a glaciarium for the first time would be nothing to it in its
+results, I fancy.  (I remember we children used to scrape the sap off,
+and eat it with satisfaction, if not with relish--white box I think
+the trees were.)
+
+Ben must have broken into a canter as he reached the level, as indeed
+his horse's tracks showed he did, and the horse must have blundered in
+the smoke, or jumped too long or too short; anyway, his long
+slithering shoe marks were in the sap on the log, and he lay there
+with a broken leg and shoulder.  He had struck it near the stump and
+the sharp edge of an outcrop of rock.
+
+There was more breakneck riding, and they got a cart and some bedding
+and carried Ben to Anderson's, which was handiest, if not nearest, and
+there was more wild and reckless riding for the doctor.
+
+One got a gun, and rode back to shoot the horse.
+
+Ben's case was hopeless from the first.  He was hurt close to that big
+heart of his, as well as having a fractured skull.  He talked a lot of
+the selections and old John Tierney, of the old bark school; and the
+Never-Never country with Jack--and, later on, of the present.
+"What's Ben sayin' now, Jim?" asked one young bushman as another
+came out of the room with an awestruck face.
+
+"He's sayin' that Jack Denver's dead, killed ridin' home from the
+races, an' that the funeral's to-morrow, an' we're to roll up at
+Talbragar!" answered the other, with wide eyes, a blank face and in
+an awed voice.  "He's thinkin' to-day's yisterday."
+
+But towards the end, under the ministrations of the doctor, Ben became
+conscious.  He rolled his head a little on the pillow after he woke,
+and then, seeming to remember all that happened up to his stunning
+fall, he asked quietly:
+
+"What sort of a funeral did Jack have?"
+
+They told him it was the biggest ever seen in the district.
+
+"Muster bin more'n a mile long," said one.
+
+"Watcher talkin' about, Jim?" put in another.  "Yer talkin' through
+yer socks.  It was more'n a mile an' a half, Ben, if it was er inch.
+Some of the chaps timed it an' measured it an' compared notes as well
+as they could.  Why, the head was at the Racecourse when the tail was
+at Old--"
+
+Ben sank back satisfied and a little later took the track that Jack
+Denver had taken.
+
+
+
+
+WANTED BY THE POLICE
+
+
+
+Could it have been the Soul of Man and none higher that gave spoken
+and written word to the noblest precepts of human nature?  For the
+deeper you sound it the more noble it seems, in spite of all the
+wrong, injustice, sin, sorrow, pain, religion, atheism, and cynics in
+the world.  We make (or are supposed to make, or allow others to make)
+laws for the protection of society, or property, or religion, or what
+you will; and we pay thousands of men like ourselves to protect those
+laws and see them carried out; and we build and maintain expensive
+offices, police stations, court-houses and jails for the protecting
+and carrying out of those laws, and the punishing of men--like
+ourselves--who break them.  Yet, in our heart of hearts we are
+antagonistic to most of the laws, and to the Law as a whole (which we
+regard as an ass), and to the police magistrates and the judges.  And
+we hate lawyers and loathe spies, pimps, and informers of all
+descriptions and the hangman with all our soul.  For the Soul of Man
+says: Thou shalt not refuse refuge to the outcast, and thou shalt not
+betray the wanderer.
+
+And those who do it we make outcast.
+
+So we form Prisoners' Aid Societies, and Prisoners' Defence Societies,
+and subscribe to them and praise them and love them and encourage them
+to protect or defend men from the very laws that we pay so dearly to
+maintain.  And how many of us, in the case of a crime against
+property--and though the property be public and ours--would refuse
+tucker to the hunted man, and a night's shelter from the pouring rain
+and the scowling, haunting, threatening, and terrifying darkness?  Or
+show the police in the morning the track the poor wretch had taken?  I
+know I couldn't.
+
+The Heart of Man says: Thou shalt not.
+
+At country railway stations, where the trains stop for refreshments,
+when a prisoner goes up or down in charge of a policeman, a native
+delicacy prevents the local loafers from seeming to notice him; but at
+the last moment there is always some hand to thrust in a clay pipe and
+cake of tobacco, and maybe a bag of sandwiches to the policeman.
+
+And, when a prisoner escapes, in the country at least--unless he be a
+criminal maniac in for a serious offence, and therefore a real danger
+to society--we all honestly hope that they won't catch him, and we
+don't hide it.  And, if put in a corner, most of us would help them
+not to catch him.
+
+The thing came down through the ages and survived through the dark
+Middle Ages, as all good things come down through the ages and survive
+through the blackest ages.  The hunted man in the tree, or cave, or
+hole, and strangers creeping to him with food in the darkness, and in
+fear and trembling; though he was, as often happened, an enemy to
+their creed, country, or party.  For he was outcast, and hungry, and a
+wanderer whom men sought to kill.
+
+These were mostly poor people or peasants; but it was so with the rich
+and well-to-do in the bloody Middle Ages.  The Catholic country
+gentleman helping the Protestant refugee to escape disguised as a
+manservant (or a maidservant), and the Protestant country gentleman
+doing likewise by a hunted Catholic in his turn, as the battles went.
+Rebel helping royalist, and royalist helping rebel.  And always, here
+and there, down through those ages, the delicate girl standing with
+her back to a door and her arms outstretched across it, and facing,
+with flashing eyes, the soldiers of the king or of the church--or
+entertaining and bluffing them with beautiful lies--to give some poor
+hunted devil time to hide or escape, though she a daughter of
+royalists and the church, and he a rebel to his king and a traitor to
+his creed.  For they sought to kill him.
+
+There was sanctuary in those times, in the monkeries--and the
+churches, where the soldiers of the king dared not go, for fear of
+God.  There has been sanctuary since, in London and other places,
+where His or Her Majesty's police dared not go because of the fear of
+man.  The "Rocks" was really sanctuary, even in my time--also
+Woollomooloo.  Now the only sanctuary is the jail.
+
+And, not so far away, my masters!  Down close to us in history, and in
+Merrie England, during Judge Jeffreys's "Bloody Assize," which
+followed on the Monmouth rebellion and formed the blackest page in
+English history, "a worthy widow named Elizabeth Gaunt was burned
+alive at Tyburn, for having sheltered a wretch who himself gave
+evidence against her.  She settled the fuel about herself with her own
+hands, so that the flames should reach her quickly; and nobly said,
+with her last breath, that she had obeyed the sacred command of God,
+to give refuge to the outcast and not to betray the wanderer."
+(Charles Dickens's _History of England._)
+
+Note, I am not speaking of rebel to rebel, or loyalist to loyalist, or
+comrade to comrade, or clansman to clansman in trouble--that goes
+without saying--but of man and woman to man and woman in trouble, the
+highest form of clannishness, the clannishness that embraces the whole
+of this wicked world--the Clan of Mankind!
+
+French people often helped English prisoners of war to escape to the
+coast and across the water, and English people did likewise by the
+French; and none dared raise the cry of "traitors."  It was the
+highest form of patriotism on both sides.  And, by the way, it was,
+is, and shall always be the women who are first to pity and help the
+rebel refugee or the fallen enemy.
+
+Succour thine enemy.
+
+
+There must have been a lot of human kindness under the smothering,
+stifling cloud of the "System" and behind the iron clank and
+swishing "cat" strokes of brutality--a lot of soul light in the
+darkness of our dark past--a page that has long since been closed
+down--when innocent men and women were transported to shame, misery,
+and horror; when mere boys were sent out on suspicion of stealing a
+hare from the squire's preserves, and mere girls on suspicion of
+lifting a riband from the merchant's counter.  But the many kindly
+and self-sacrificing and even noble things that free and honest
+settlers did, in those days of loneliness and hardship, for wretched
+runaway convicts and others, are closed down with the pages too.  My
+old grandmother used to tell me tales, but--well, I don't suppose a
+wanted man (or a man that wasn't wanted, for that matter) ever turned
+away from her huts, far back in the wild bush, without a quart of
+coffee and a "feed" inside his hunted carcass, or went short of a
+bit of bread and meat to see him on, and a gruff but friendly hint,
+maybe, from the old man himself.  And they were a type of the early
+settlers, she an English lady and the daughter of a clergyman.  Ah!
+well---
+
+Do you ever seem to remember things that you could not possibly
+remember?  Something that happened in your mother's life, maybe, if
+you are a girl, or your father's, if you are a boy--that happened to
+your mother or father some years, perhaps, before you were born.  I
+have many such haunting memories--as of having once witnessed a
+murder, or an attempt at murder, for instance, and once seeing a tree
+fall on a man--and as a child I had a memory of having been a man
+myself once before.  But here is one of the pictures.
+
+A hut in a dark gully; slab and stringy-bark, two rooms and a detached
+kitchen with the boys' room roughly partitioned off it.  Big clay
+fire-place with a big log fire in it.  The settler, or selector, and
+his wife; another man who might have been "uncle," and a younger
+woman who might have been "aunt;" two little boys and the baby.  It
+was raining heavens hard outside, and the night was as black as pitch.
+The uncle was reading a report in a paper (that seemed to have come,
+somehow, a long way from somewhere) about two men who were wanted for
+sheep- and cattle-stealing in the district.  I decidedly remember it
+was during the reign of the squatters in the nearer west.  There came
+a great gust that shook the kitchen and caused the mother to take up
+the baby out of the rough gin-case cradle.  The father took his pipe
+from his mouth and said: "Ah, well! poor devils."  "I hope they're
+not out in a night like this, poor fellows," said the mother, rocking
+the child in her arms.  "And I hope they'll never catch 'em,"
+snapped her sister.  "The squatters has enough."
+
+"I wonder where poor Jim is?"  the mother moaned, rocking the baby,
+and with two of those great, silent tears starting from her haggard
+eyes.
+
+"Oh don't start about Jim again, Ellen," said her sister
+impatiently.  "He can take care of himself.  You were always rushing
+off to meet trouble half-way--time enough when they come, God knows."
+
+"Now, look here, Ellen," put in Uncle Abe, soothingly, "he was up
+in Queensland doing well when we last heerd of him.  Ain't yer never
+goin' to be satisfied?"
+
+Jim was evidently another and a younger uncle, whose temperament from
+boyhood had given his family constant cause for anxiety.
+
+The father sat smoking, resting his elbow on his knee, bunching up his
+brush of red whiskers, and looking into the fire--and back into his
+own foreign past in his own foreign land perhaps: and, it may be,
+thinking in his own language.
+
+Silence and smoke for a while; then the mother suddenly straightened
+up and lifted a finger:
+
+"Hush! What's that?  I thought I heard someone outside."
+
+"Old Poley coughin'," said Uncle Abe, after they'd listened a space.
+"She must be pretty bad--oughter give her a hot bran mash."  (Poley
+was the best milker.)
+
+"But I fancied I heard horses at the sliprails,"  said the mother.
+
+"Old Prince,"  said Uncle Abe.  "Oughter let him into the shed."`
+
+"Hush!" said the mother, "there's someone outside."  There
+_was_ a step, as of someone retreating after peeping through a
+crack in the door, but it was not old Poley's step; then, from farther
+off, a cough that was like old Poley's cough, but had a rack in it.
+
+"See who it is, Peter," said the mother.  Uncle Abe, who was
+dramatic and an ass, slipped the old double-barrelled muzzle-loader
+from its leathers on the wall and stood it in the far corner and sat
+down by it.  The mother, who didn't seem to realize anything, frowned
+at him impatiently.  The coughing fit started again.  It was a man.
+
+"Who's there?  Anyone outside there?"  said the settler in a loud
+voice.
+
+"It's all right.  Is the boss there?  I want to speak to him,"
+replied a voice with no cough in it.  The tone was reassuring, yet
+rather strained, as if there had been an accident--or it might be a
+cautious policeman or bushranger reconnoitring.
+
+"Better see what he wants, Peter,"  said his sister-in-law quietly.
+"Something's the matter--it may be the police."
+
+Peter threw an empty bag over his shoulders, took the peg from the
+door, opened it and stepped out.  The racking fit of coughing burst
+forth again, nearer.  "That's a church-yarder!"  commented Uncle
+Abe.
+
+The settler came inside and whispered to the others, who started up,
+interested.  The coughing started again outside.  When the fit was
+over the mother said:
+
+"Wait a minute till I get the boys out of the road and then bring
+them in."  The boys were bundled into the end room and told to go to
+bed at once.  They knelt up on the rough bed of slabs and straw
+mattress, instead, and applied eyes and ears to the cracks in the
+partition.
+
+The mother called to the father, who had gone outside again.
+
+"Tell them to come inside, Peter."
+
+"Better bring the horses into the yard first and put them under
+the shed," said the father to the unknown outside in the rain and
+darkness.  Clatter of sliprails let down and tired hoofs over them,
+and sliprails put up again; then they came in.
+
+Wringing wet and apparently knocked up, a tall man with black curly
+hair and beard, black eyes and eyebrows that made his face seem the
+whiter; dressed in tweed coat, too small for him and short at the
+sleeves, strapped riding-pants, leggings, and lace-up boots, all
+sodden.  The other a mere boy, beardless or clean shaven, figure and
+face of a native, but lacking in something; dressed like his
+mate--like drovers or stockmen.  Arms and legs of riders, both of
+them; cabbage-tree hats in left hands--as though the right ones had to
+be kept ready for something (and looking like it)--pistol butts
+probably.  The young man had a racking cough that seemed to wrench and
+twist his frame as the settler steered him to a seat on a stool by the
+fire.  (In the intervals of coughing he glared round like a watched
+and hunted sneak-thief--as if the cough was something serious against
+the law, and he must try to stop it.)
+
+"Take that wet coat off him at once, Peter," said the settler's
+wife, "and let me dry it."  Then, on second thoughts: "Take this
+candle and take him into the house and get some dry things on him."
+
+The dark man, who was still standing in the doorway, swung aside to
+let them pass as the settler steered the young man into the "house;"
+then swung back again.  He stood, drooping rather, with one hand on
+the door-post; his big, wild, dark eyes kept glancing round and round
+the room and even at the ceiling, seeming to overlook or be
+unconscious of the faces after the first keen glance, but always
+coming back to rest on the door in the partition of the boys' room
+opposite.
+
+"Won't you sit down by the fire and rest and dry yourself?"  asked
+the settler's wife, rather timidly, after watching him for a moment.
+
+He looked at the door again, abstractedly it seemed, or as if he had
+not heard her.
+
+Then Uncle Abe (who, by the way, was supposed to know more than he
+should have been supposed to know) spoke out.
+
+"Set down, man!  Set down and dry yerself.  There's no one there
+except the boys--that's the boys' room.  Would yer like to look
+through?"
+
+The man seemed to rouse himself from a reverie.  He let his arm and
+hand fall from the doorpost to his side like dead things.  "Thank
+you, missus," he said, apparently unconscious of Uncle Abe, and went
+and sat down in front of the fire.
+
+"Hadn't you better take your wet coat off and let me dry it?"
+
+"Thank you."  He took off his coat, and, turning the sleeve, inside
+out, hung it from his knees with the lining to the fire then he leaned
+forward, with his hands on his knees, and stared at the burning logs
+and steam.  He was unarmed, or, if not, had left his pistols in the
+saddle-bag outside.
+
+Andy Page, general handy-man (who was there all the time, but has not
+been mentioned yet, because he didn't mention anything himself which
+seemed necessary to this dark picture), now remarked to the stranger,
+with a wooden-face expression but a soft heart, that the rain would be
+a good thing for the grass, mister, and make it grow; a safe remark to
+make under the present, or, for the matter of that, under any
+circumstances.
+
+The stranger said, "Yes; it would."
+
+"It will make it spring up like anything," said Andy.
+
+The stranger admitted that it would.
+
+Uncle Abe joined in, or, rather, slid in, and they talked about the
+drought and the rain and the state of the country, in monosyllables
+mostly, with "Jesso," and "So it is," and "You're right there,"
+till the settler came back with the young man dressed in rough and
+patched, but dry, clothes.  He took another stool by his mate's side
+at the fire, and had another fit of coughing.  When it was over, Uncle
+Abe remarked "That's a regular church-yarder yer got, young feller."
+
+The young fellow, too exhausted to speak, even had he intended doing
+so, turned his head in a quick, half-terrified way and gave it two
+short jerky nods.
+
+The settler had brought a bottle out--it was gin they kept for
+medicine.  They gave him some hot, and he took it in his sudden,
+frightened, half-animal way, like a dog that was used to ill-usage.
+
+"He ought to be in the hospital,"  said the mother.
+
+"He ought to be in bed right now at once," snapped the sister.
+"Couldn't you stay till morning, or at least till the rain clears
+up?" she said to the elder man.  "No one ain't likely to come near
+this place in this weather."
+
+"If we did he'd stand a good chance to get both hospital and a bed
+pretty soon, and for a long stretch, too," said the dark man grimly.
+"No, thank you all the same, miss--and missus--I'll get him fixed up
+all right and safe before morning."
+
+The father came into the end room with a couple of small feed boxes
+and both boys tumbled under the blankets.  The father emptied some
+chaff, from a bag in the corner, into the boxes, and then dished some
+corn from another bag into the chaff and mixed it well with his hands.
+Then he went out with the boxes under his arms, and the boys got up
+again.
+
+The mother had brought two chairs from the front room (I remember the
+kind well: black painted hardwood that were always coming to pieces
+and with apples painted on the backs).  She stood them with their
+backs to the fire and, taking up the young man's wet clothes, which
+the settler had brought out under his arm and thrown on a stool,
+arranged them over the backs of chairs and the stool to dry.  He lost
+some of his nervousness or seared manner under the influence of the
+gin, and answered one or two questions with reference to his
+complaint.
+
+The baby was in the cradle asleep.  The sister drew boiling water from
+the old-fashioned fountain over one side of the fire and made coffee.
+The mother laid the coarse brownish cloth and set out the camp-oven
+bread, salt beef, tin plates, and pintpots.  This was always called
+"setting the table" in the bush.  "You'd better have it by the
+fire," said the bush-wife to the dark man.
+
+"Thank you, missus,"  he said, as he moved to a bench by the table,
+"but it's plenty warm enough here.  Come on, Jack."
+
+Jack, under the influence of another tot, was in a fit state to sit
+down to a table something like a Christian, instead of coming to his
+food like a beaten dog.
+
+The hum of bush common-places went on.  One of the boys fell across
+the bed and into deep slumber; the other watched on awhile, but must
+have dozed.
+
+When he was next aware, he saw, through the cracks, the taller man
+putting on his dried coat by the fire; then he went to a rough "sofa"
+at the side of the kitchen, where the young man was sleeping--with his
+head and shoulders curled in to the wall and his arm over his face,
+like a possum hiding from the light--and touched him on the shoulder.
+
+"Come on, Jack,"  he said, "wake up."
+
+Jack sprang to his feet with a blundering rush, grappled with his
+mate, and made a break for the door.
+
+"It's all right, Jack," said the other, gently yet firmly, holding
+and shaking him.  "Go in with the boss and get into your own
+clothes--we've got to make a start.  "The other came to himself and
+went inside quietly with the settler.  The dark man stretched himself,
+crossed the kitchen and looked down at the sleeping child; he returned
+to the fire without comment.  The wildness had left his eyes.  The
+bushwoman was busy putting some tucker in a sugar-bag.  "There's tea
+and sugar and salt in these mustard tins, and they won't get wet,"
+she said, "and there's some butter too; but I don't know how you'll
+manage about the bread--I've wrapped it up, but you'll have to keep it
+dry as well as you can."
+
+"Thank you, missus, but that'll be all right.  I've got a bit of
+oil-cloth," he said.
+
+They spoke lamely for a while, against time; then the bushwoman
+touched the spring, and their voices became suddenly low and earnest
+as they drew together.  The stranger spoke as at a funeral, but the
+funeral was his own.
+
+"I don't care about myself so much," he said, "for I'm tired of it,
+and--and--for the matter of that I'm tired of everything; but I'd like
+to see poor Jack right, and I'll try to get clear myself, for his
+sake.  You've seen him.  I can't blame myself, for I took him from a
+life that was worse than jail.  You know how much worse than animals
+some brutes treat their children in the bush.  And he was an
+'adopted.'  You know what that means.  He was idiotic with
+ill-treatment when I got hold of him.  He's sensible enough when away
+with me, and true as steel.  He's about the only living human thing
+I've got to care for, or to care for me, and I want to win out of this
+hell for his sake."
+
+He paused, and they were all silent.  He was measuring time, as his
+next words proved: "Jack must be nearly ready now."  Then he took a
+packet from some inside pocket of his blue dungaree shirt.  It was
+wrapped in oil-cloth, and he opened it and laid it on the table; there
+was a small Bible and a packet of letters--and portraits, maybe.
+
+"Now, missus," he said, "you mustn't think me soft, and I'm neither
+a religious man nor a hypocrite.  But that Bible was given to me by my
+mother, and her hand-writing is in it, so I couldn't chuck it away.
+Some of the letters are hers and some--someone else's.  You can read
+them if you like.  Now, I want you to take care of them for me and dry
+them if they are a little damp.  If I get clear I'll send for them
+some day, and, if I don't--well, I don't want them to be taken with
+me.  I don't want the police to know who I was, and what I was, and
+who my relatives are and where they are.  You wouldn't have known, if
+you do know now, only your husband knew me on the diggings, and
+happened to be in the court when I got off on that first
+cattle-stealing charge, and recognized me again to-night.  I can't
+thank you enough, but I want you to remember that I'll never forget.
+Even if I'm taken and have to serve my time I'll never forget it, and
+I'll live to prove it."
+
+"We--we don't want no thanks, an' we don't want no proofs," said the
+bushwoman, her voice breaking.
+
+The sister, her eyes suspiciously bright, took up the packet in her
+sharp, practical way, and put it in a work-box she had in the kitchen.
+
+The settler brought the young fellow out dressed in his own clothes.
+The elder shook hands quietly all round, or, rather, they shook hands
+with him.  "Now, Jack!" he said.  They had fastened an oilskin cape
+round Jack's shoulders.
+
+Jack came forward and shook hands with a nervous grip that he seemed
+to have trouble to take off.  "I won't forget it," he said; "that's
+all I can say--I won't forget it."  Then they went out with the
+settler.  The rain had held up a little.  Clatter of sliprails down
+and up, but the settler didn't come back.
+
+"Wonder what Peter's doing?" said the wife.
+
+"Showin' 'em down the short cut," said Uncle Abe.
+
+But, presently, clatter of sliprails down again, and cattle driven
+over them.
+
+"Wonder what he's doing with the cows," said the wife.
+
+They waited in wonder, and with growing anxiety, for some quarter of
+an hour; then Abe and Andy, going out to see, met the settler coming
+back.
+
+"What in thunder are you doing with the cows, Peter?" asked Uncle
+Abe.
+
+"Oh, just driving them out and along a bit over those horse tracks;
+we might get into trouble," said Peter.
+
+When the boys woke it was morning, and the mother stood by the bed.
+"You needn't get up yet, and don't say anyone was here last night if
+you're asked," she whispered, and went out.  They were up on their
+knees at once with their eyes to the cracks, and got the scare of
+their young lives.  Three mounted troopers were steaming their legs at
+the fire--their bodies had been protected by oilskin capes.  The
+mother was busy about the table and the sister changing the baby.
+Presently the two younger policemen sat down to bread and bacon and
+coffee, but their senior (the sergeant) stood with his back to the
+fire, with a pint-pot of coffee in his hand, eating nothing, but
+frowning suspiciously round the room.
+
+Said one of the young troopers to Aunt Annie, to break the lowering
+silence, "You don't remember me?"
+
+"Oh yes, I do; you were at Brown's School at Old Pipeclay--but I was
+only there a few months."
+
+"You look as if you didn't get much sleep," said the senior-
+sergeant, bluntly, to the settler's wife, "and your sister too."
+
+"And so would you," said Aunt Annie, sharply, "if you were up with
+a sick baby all night."
+
+"Sad affair that, about Brown the schoolmaster," said the younger
+trooper to Aunt Annie.
+
+"Yes," said Aunt Annie, "it was indeed."
+
+The senior-sergeant stood glowering.  Presently he said brutally--
+"The baby don't seem to be very sick; what's the matter with it?"
+
+The young troopers move uneasily, and one impatiently.
+
+"You should have seen her" (the baby) "about twelve o'clock last
+night," said Aunt Annie, "we never thought she would live till the
+morning."
+
+"Oh, didn't you?" said the senior-sergeant, in a half-and-half tone.
+
+The mother took the baby and held it so that its face was hidden from
+the elder policeman.
+
+"What became of Brown's family, miss?"  asked the young trooper.
+"Do you remember Lucy Brown?"
+
+"I really don't know," answered Aunt Annie, "all I know is that
+they went to Sydney.  But I think I heard that Lucy was married."
+
+Just then Uncle Abe and Andy came in to breakfast.  Andy sat down in
+the corner with a wooden face, and Uncle Abe, who was a tall man, took
+up a position, with his back to the fire, by the side of the senior
+trooper, and seemed perfectly at home and at ease.  He lifted up his
+coat behind, and his face was a study in bucolic unconsciousness.
+The settler passed through to the boys' room (which was harness room,
+feed room, tool house, and several other things), and as he passed out
+with a shovel the sergeant said, "So you haven't seen anyone along
+here for three days?"
+
+"No," said the settler.
+
+"Except Jimmy Marshfield that took over Barker's selection in Long
+Gully," put in Aunt Annie.  "He was here yesterday.  Do you want
+him?"
+
+"An' them three fellers on horseback as rode past the corner of the
+lower paddock the day afore yesterday," mumbled Uncle Abe, "but one
+of 'em was one of the Coxes' boys, I think."
+
+At the sound of Uncle Abe's voice both women started and paled, and
+looked as if they'd like to gag him, but he was safe.
+
+"What were they like?" asked the constable.
+
+The women paled again, but Uncle Abe described them.  He had
+imagination, and was only slow where the truth was concerned.
+
+"Which way were they going?" asked the constable.  "Towards
+Mudgee" (the police-station township), said Uncle Abe.
+
+The constable gave his arm an impatient jerk and dropped Uncle Abe.
+
+Uncle Abe looked as if he wanted badly to wink hard at someone, but
+there was no friendly eye in the line of wink that would be safe.
+
+"Well, it's strange," said the sergeant, "that the men we're after
+didn't look up an out-of-the-way place like this for tucker, or
+horse-feed, or news, or something."
+
+"Now, look here," said Aunt Annie, "we're neither cattle duffers
+nor sympathizers; we're honest, hard-working people, and God knows
+we're glad enough to see a strange face when it comes to this lonely
+hole; and if you only want to insult us, you'd better stop it at once.
+I tell you there's nobody been here but old Jimmy Marshfield for three
+days, and we haven't seen a stranger for over a fortnight, and that's
+enough.  My sister's delicate and worried enough without you."  She
+had a masculine habit of putting her hand up on something when holding
+forth, and as it happened it rested on the work-box on the shelf that
+contained the cattle-stealer's mother's Bible; but if put to it, Aunt
+Annie would have sworn on the Bible itself.
+
+"Oh well, no offence, no offence," said the constable.  "Come on,
+men, if you've finished, it's no use wasting time round here."
+
+The two young troopers thanked the mother for their breakfast, and
+strange to say, the one who had spoken to her went up to Aunt Annie
+and shook hands warmly with her.  Then they went out, and mounting,
+rode back in the direction of Mudgee.  Uncle Abe winked long and hard
+and solemnly at Andy Page, and Andy winked back like a mechanical
+wooden image.  The two women nudged and smiled and seemed quite
+girlish, not to say skittish, all the morning.  Something had come to
+break the cruel hopeless monotony of their lives.  And even the
+settler became foolishly cheerful.
+
+
+Five years later: same hut, same yard, and a not much wider clearing
+in the gully, and a little more fencing--the women rather more haggard
+and tired looking, the settler rather more horny-handed and silent,
+and Uncle Abe rather more philosophical.  The men had had to go out
+and work on the stations.  With the settler and his wife it was, "If
+we only had a few pounds to get the farm cleared and fenced, and
+another good plough horse, and a few more cows."  That had been the
+burden of their song for the five years and more.
+
+Then, one evening, the mail boy left a parcel.  It was a small parcel,
+in cloth-paper, carefully tied and sealed.  What could it be?  It
+couldn't be the Christmas number of a weekly they subscribed to, for
+it never came like that.  Aunt Annie cut the discussion short by
+cutting the string with a table knife and breaking the wax.
+
+And behold, a clean sugar-bag tightly folded and rolled.
+
+And inside a strong whitey-brown envelope.
+
+And on the envelope written or rather printed the words:
+
+"For horse-feed, stabling, and supper."
+
+And underneath, in smaller letters, "Send Bible and portraits
+to-----."  (Here a name and address.)
+
+And inside the envelope a roll of notes.
+
+"Count them," said Aunt Annie.
+
+But the settler's horny and knotty hands trembled too much, and so did
+his wife's withered ones; so Aunt Annie counted them.
+
+"Fifty pounds!" she said.
+
+"Fifty pounds!" mused the settler, scratching his head in a
+perplexed way.
+
+"Fifty pounds!" gasped his wife.
+
+"Yes," said Aunt Annie sharply, "fifty pounds!"
+
+"Well, you'll get it settled between yer some day!" drawled Uncle
+Abe.
+
+Later, after thinking comfortably over the matter, he observed:
+
+"Cast yer coffee an' bread an' bacon upon the waters---"
+
+Uncle Abe never hurried himself or anybody else.
+
+
+
+
+THE BATH
+
+
+
+The moral should be revived.  Therefore, this is a story with a moral.
+The lower end of Bill Street--otherwise William--overlooks Blue's
+Point Road, with a vacant wedge-shaped allotment running down from a
+Scottish church between Bill Street the aforesaid and the road, and a
+terrace on the other side of the road.  A cheap, mean-looking terrace
+of houses, flush with the pavement, each with two windows upstairs and
+a large one in the middle downstairs, with a slit on one side of it
+called a door--looking remarkably skully in ghastly dawns, afterglows,
+and rainy afternoons and evenings.  The slits look as if the owners of
+the skulls got it there from an upward blow of a sharp tomahawk, from
+a shorter man--who was no friend of theirs--just about the time they
+died.  The slits open occasionally, and mothers of the nation, mostly
+holding their garments together at neck or bosom, lean out--at right
+angles almost--and peer up and down the road, as if they are casually
+curious as to what is keeping the rent collector so late this morning.
+Then they shut up till late in the day, when a boy or two comes home
+from work.  The terrace should be called "Jim's Terrace" if the road
+is not "James's" Road, because no bills ever seem to be paid there
+as they are in our street--and for other reasons.  There are four
+houses, but seldom more than two of them occupied at one time--often
+only one.  Tenants never shift in, or at least are never seen to, but
+they get there.  The sign is a furtive candle light behind an old
+table cloth, a skirt, or any rag of dark stuff tacked across the front
+bedroom window, upstairs, and a shadow suggestive of a woman making up
+a bed on the floor.
+
+If more than two of the houses are occupied there is almost certain to
+be an old granny with ragged grey hair, who folded her arms tight under
+her ragged old breasts, and bends her tough old body, and sticks her
+ragged grey old head out of the slit called a door, and squints up and
+down the road, but not in the interests of mischief-making--they are
+never here long enough--only out of mild, ragged, grey-headed
+curiosity regarding the health or affairs of the rent collector.
+
+Perhaps there are no bills to be collected in Skull Terrace because no
+credit is given.  No jugs are put out, because there is no place to
+put them, except on the pavement, or on the narrow window ledges,
+where they would be in great and constant danger from the feet or
+elbows of passers-by.  There are no tradesmen's entrances to the
+houses in Skull Terrace.
+
+Tenants and sub-tenants often leave on Friday morning in the full
+glare of the day.  Granny throws down garments from the top window to
+hurry things, and the wife below ties up much in an old allegedly
+green or red table-cloth, on the pavement, at the last moment.  Van of
+the "bottle ho"  variety.  It is all done very quickly, and nobody
+takes any notice--they are never there long enough.  Landlord,
+landlady, or rent collector--or whatever it is--calls later on; maybe,
+knocks in a tired, even bored, way; makes inquiries next door, and
+goes away, leaving the problem to take care of itself--all kind of
+casual.  The business people of North Sydney, especially removers and
+labourers, are very casual.  Down old Blue's Point Road the folk get
+so casual that they just exist, but don't seem to do so.
+
+One thing I never could make out about Skull Terrace is that when one
+house becomes vacant from a house agent's point of view--there is a
+permanent atmosphere of vacancy about the whole terrace--the people of
+another move into it.  And there's not the slightest difference
+between the houses.  It is because the removal is such a small affair,
+I suppose, and the change is, the main thing.  I always do better for
+awhile in a new house--but then I always did seem to get on better
+somewhere else.
+
+There are many points, or absence of points, about Skull Terrace that
+fit in with Jim's casualness as against Bill's character, therefore
+Blue's Point Road ought to be James's Street.
+
+But just now, in the heat of summer, the terrace happens to be full,
+and all the blinds are decent--the two new-comers are newly come down
+to Skull Terrace, and the other blinds are looked up, washed, and
+fixed up by force of example or from very shame's sake.
+
+All of which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the story,
+except that the scene is down opposite my balcony as I think and
+smoke, and it is a blur on one of the most beautiful harbour views in
+the world.
+
+
+I had been working hard all day, mending the fence, putting up a
+fowl-house and some lattice work and wire netting, and limewashing and
+painting.  Labours of love.  I'd rather build a fowl-house than a
+"pome" or story, any day.  And when finished--the fowl-house, I
+mean--I sit and contemplate my handiwork with pure and unadulterated
+joy.  And I take a candle out several times, after dark, to look at it
+again.  I never got such pleasure out of rhyme, story, or first-class
+London Academy notice.  I find it difficult to drag myself from the
+fowl-house, or whatever it is, to meals, and harder to this work, and
+I lie awake planning next day's work until I fall asleep in the sleep
+of utter happy weariness.  And I'm up and at it, before washing, at
+daylight.  But I was a carpenter and housepainter first.
+
+Well, it had been a long, close day, and I was very dirty and tired,
+but with the energy and restlessness of healthy, happy tiredness when
+work is unfinished.  But I was out of two-inch nails, and the shops
+were shut.
+
+Then it struck me to start up the copper and have a real warm bath
+after my own heart and ideas.  The bathroom is outside, next the
+wash-house and copper.  There were plenty of splinters and ends of
+softwood that were mine by right of purchase and labour.  My landlady
+is, and always has been, sensitive on the subject of firewood.  She'll
+buy anything else to make the house comfortable and beautiful.  She
+has been known to buy a piano for one of her nieces and burn rubbish
+in the stove the same day.  I knew she was uneasy about the softwood
+odds and ends, but I couldn't help that--she'd still be sentimental
+about them if she had a stack of firewood as big as the house.
+There's at least one thing that most folk hate to buy--mine's
+boot-laces or bone studs, so long as I can make pins or inked string
+do.
+
+I put a bucket of water in the copper, started a fire under that sent
+sparks out of the wash-house flue at an alarming rate, filled the
+copper to the brim, and, in the absence of a lid, covered it with a
+piece of flattened galvanized iron I had.
+
+I tacked the side edge of a strip of canvas to the matchboard wall
+along over the inner edge of the bath, fastened a short piece of
+gas-pipe to the outer edge, with pieces of string through holes made
+in it, and let it hang down over the bath, leaving a hole at the head
+for my head and shoulders.  I was going to have a long, comfortable,
+and utterly lazy and drowsy hot water and steam bath, you know.
+
+I fastened a piece of clothes-line round and over the head of the
+bath, and twisted an old toilet-table cover and a towel round it where
+it sagged into the bath, for a head rest-also to be soaped for where I
+couldn't get at my back with my hands.
+
+I went up to my room for some things, and it struck me to arrange two
+chairs by the bed--candle and matches and tobacco on one side, and a
+pile of Jack London, Kipling, and Yankee magazines on the other, with
+the last _Lone Hand_ and _Bulletin_ on top.
+
+Going down with pyjamas, towel, and soap, it struck me to have a
+kettle and a saucepan full of water on the stove to use as the water
+from the copper cooled.
+
+I took a roomy, hard-bottomed kitchen chair into the bathroom; on it I
+placed a carefully scraped, cleared, and filled pipe, matches, more
+tobacco, tooth-brush, saucer with a lump of whiting and salt, piece of
+looking-glass--to see progress of the teeth--and knife for finger and
+toe nails.  And I knocked up a few three-inch iron nails in the wall
+to hang things on.  I placed a clean suit of pyjamas over the back of
+the chair, and over them the towels.
+
+I arranged with the landlady to have a good cup of coffee made, as she
+knows how to make it, ready to hand in round the edge of the door when
+I should be in the bath.  There's nothing in that.  I've been with her
+for years, and on account of the canvas it would be just the same as
+if I were in bed.  On second thought I asked her to hand in some toast
+--or bread and butter and bloater paste--at the same time.  I fed the
+fire with judgment, and the copper boiled just as the last blaze died
+down.  I got a pail and carried the water to the bath, pouring it in
+through the opening at the head.  The last few pints I dipped into the
+pail with a cup.  I covered the opening with a towel to keep the steam
+and heat in until I was ready.  I got the boiling water from the
+kitchen into the bucket, covered it with another towel, and stood it
+in a handy corner in the bathroom.
+
+I made an opening, turned on the cold water, and commenced to undress.
+I hung my clothes on the wall, till morning, for I intended to go
+straight from the bath to bed in my pyjamas and to lie there reading.
+
+I turned off the cold water tap to be sure, lifted the towel off, and
+put my good right foot in to feel the temperature--into about three
+inches of cold water, and that was vanishing.
+
+I'd forgotten to put in the plug.
+
+I'm deaf, you know, and the landlady, hearing the water run, thought I
+was flushing out the bath (we were new tenants) and wondered vaguely
+why I was so long at it.
+
+I dressed rather hurriedly in my working clothes, went inside, and
+spread myself dramatically on the old cane lounge and covered my face
+with my oldest hat, to show that it was comic and I took it that way.
+But my landlady was so full of sympathy, condolence, and self-reproach
+(because she failed to draw my attention to the gurgling) that she let
+the coffee and toast burn.
+
+I went up and lay on my bed, and was so tired and misty and far away
+that I went to sleep without undressing, or even washing my face and
+hands.
+
+How many, in this life, forget the plug!
+
+And how many, ah! how many, who passed through, and are passing
+through Skull Terrace, commenced life as confidently, carefree, and
+clear headed, and with such easily exercised, careful, intelligent,
+practised, and methodical attention to details as I did the bath
+business arrangements--and forgot to put in the plug.
+
+And many because they were handicapped physically.
+
+
+
+
+INSTINCT GONE WRONG
+
+
+
+Old Mac used to sleep in his wagon in fine weather, when he had no
+load, on his blankets spread out on the feed-bags; but one time he
+struck Croydon, flush from a lucky and good back trip, and looked in
+at the (say) Royal Hotel to wet his luck--as some men do with their
+sorrow--and he "got there all right."  Next morning he had breakfast
+in the dining-room, was waited on as a star boarder, and became
+thoroughly demoralized; and his mind was made up (independent of
+himself, as it were) to be a gentleman for once in his life.  He went
+over to the store and bought the sloppiest suit of reach-me-downs of
+glossiest black, and the stiffest and stickiest white shirt they had
+to show--also four bone studs, two for the collar and two for the
+cuffs.  Then he gave his worn "larstins" to the stable-boy (with
+half a crown) to clean, and--proceeded.  He put the boots on during
+the day, one at a time between drinks, gassing all the time, and
+continued.  He concluded about midnight, after a very noisy time and
+interviews with everyone on sight (slightly interrupted by drinks)
+concerning "his room."  It was show time, you see, and all the rooms
+were as full as he was--he was too full even to share the parlour or
+billiard room with others; but he consented at last to a shake-down on
+the balcony, the barmaid volunteering to spread the couch with her own
+fair hands.
+
+Towards daylight he woke, for one of the reasons why men do wake.  It
+is well known, to people who know, that old campers-out (and young men
+new to it, too) will wake _once_--if in a party, each at
+different times--to tend to their cattle, or listen for the hobbles of
+their horses, or simply to rise on their elbows and have a look
+round--the last, I suppose, from an instinct born in old dangerous
+times.  Mac woke up, and it was dark.  He reached out and his hand
+fell, instinctively, on the rail of the balcony, which was to him
+(instinctively--and that shows how instinct errs) the rail of the side
+of his wagon, in which as I have said, he was wont to sleep.  So he
+drew himself up on his knees and to his feet, with the instinctive
+intention of getting down to (say) put some chaff and corn in the
+feed-bags stretched across the shafts for the horses; for he intended,
+by instinct, to make an early start.  Which shows how instinct can
+never be trusted to travel with memory, but will get ahead of it--or
+behind it.  (Say it was instinct mixed with or adulterated by drink.)
+He got a long, hairy leg over and felt (instinctively) for the hub of
+the wheel; his foot found and rested on the projecting ledge of the
+balcony floor outside, and that, to him, was the hub all right.  He
+swung his other leg over and expected to drop lightly on to the grass
+or dust of the camp; but, being instinctively rigid, he fell heavily
+some fifteen feet into a kerbed gutter.
+
+As a result of his howls lights soon flickered in windows and
+fanlights; and with prompt, eager, anxious, and awed bush first-aid
+and assistance, they carried a very sober, battered and blasphemous
+driver inside and spread mattresses on the floor.  And, some six weeks
+afterwards, an image, mostly of plaster-of-Paris and bandages,
+reclined, much against its will, on a be-cushioned cane lounge on the
+hospital veranda; and, from the only free and workable corner of its
+mouth, when the pipe was removed, came shockingly expressed opinions
+of them ---- newfangled ---- two-story ----! "night houses" (as it
+called them).  And, thereafter, when he had a load on, or the weather
+was too bad for sleeping in or under his wagon, the veranda of a
+one-storied shanty (if he could get to it) was good enough for
+MacSomething, the carrier.
+
+
+
+
+THE HYPNOTIZED TOWNSHIP
+
+
+
+They said that Harry Chatswood, the mail contractor would do anything
+for Cobb & Co., even to stretching fencing-wire across the road in a
+likely place: but I don't believe that--Harry was too good-hearted to
+risk injuring innocent passengers, and he had a fellow feeling for
+drivers, being an old coach driver on rough out-back tracks himself.
+But he did rig up fencing-wire for old Mac, the carrier, one night,
+though not across the road.  Harry, by the way, was a city-born
+bushman, who had been everything for some years.  Anything from
+six-foot-six to six-foot-nine, fourteen stone, and a hard case.  He is
+a very successful coach-builder now, for he knows the wood, the roads,
+and the weak parts in a coach.
+
+It was in the good seasons when competition was keen and men's hearts
+were hard--not as it is in times of drought, when there is no
+competition, and men's hearts are soft, and there is all kindness and
+goodwill between them.  He had had much opposition in fighting Cobb &
+Co., and his coaches had won through on the outer tracks.  There was
+little malice in his composition, but when old Mac, the teamster,
+turned his teams over to his sons and started a light van for parcels
+and passengers from Cunnamulla--that place which always sounds to me
+suggestive of pumpkin pies--out in seeming opposition to Harry
+Chatswood, Harry was annoyed.
+
+Perhaps Mac only wished to end his days on the road with parcels that
+were light and easy to handle (not like loads of fencing wire) and
+passengers that were sociable; but he had been doing well with his
+teams, and, besides, Harry thought he was after the mail contract: so
+Harry was annoyed more than he was injured.  Mac was mean with the
+money he had not because of the money he had a chance of getting; and
+he mostly slept in his van, in all weathers, when away from home
+which was kept by his wife about half-way between the half-way house
+and the next "township."
+
+One dark, gusty evening, Harry Chatswood's coach dragged, heavily
+though passengerless, into Cunnamulla, and, as he turned into the yard
+of the local "Royal," he saw Mac's tilted four-wheeler (which he
+called his "van") drawn up opposite by the kerbing round the post
+office.  Mac always chose a central position--with a vague idea of
+advertisement perhaps.  But the nearness to the P.O. reminded Harry of
+the mail contracts, and he knew that Mac had taken up a passenger or
+two and some parcels in front of him (Harry) on the trip in.  And
+something told Harry that Mac was asleep inside his van.  It was a
+windy night, with signs of rain, and the curtains were drawn close.
+
+Old Mac was there all right, and sleeping the sleep of a tired driver
+after a long drowsy day on a hard box-seat, with little or no back
+railing to it.  But there was a lecture on, or an exhibition of
+hypnotism or mesmerism--"a blanky spirit rappin' fake," they called
+it, run by "some blanker" in "the hall;" and when old Mac had seen
+to his horses, he thought he might as well drop in for half an hour
+and see what was going on.  Being a Mac, he was, of course,
+theological, scientific, and argumentative.  He saw some things which
+woke him up, challenged the performer to hypnotize him, was
+"operated" on or "fooled with" a bit, had a "numb sorter
+light-headed feelin'," and was told by a voice from the back of the
+hall that his "leg was being pulled, Mac," and by another buzzin'
+far-away kind of "ventrillick" voice that he would make a good
+subject, and that, if he only had the will power and knew how (which
+he would learn from a book the professor had to sell for five
+shillings) he would be able to drive his van without horses or any
+thing, save the pole sticking straight out in front.  These weren't
+the professor's exact words--But, anyway, Mae came to himself with a
+sudden jerk, left with a great Scottish snort of disgust and the sound
+of heavy boots along the floor; and after a resentful whisky at the
+Royal, where they laughed at his scrooging bushy eyebrows, fierce
+black eyes and his deadly-in-earnest denunciation of all humbugs and
+imposters, he returned to the aforesaid van, let down the flaps,
+buttoned the daft and "feekle" world out, and himself in, and then
+retired some more and slept, as I have said, rolled in his blankets
+and overcoats on a bed of cushions, and chaff-bag.
+
+Harry Chatswood got down from his empty coach, and was helping the
+yard boy take out the horses, when his eye fell on the remnant of a
+roll of fencing wire standing by the stable wall in the light of the
+lantern.  Then an idea struck him unexpectedly, and his mind became
+luminous.  He unhooked the swinglebar, swung it up over his
+"leader's" rump (he was driving only three horses that trip), and
+hooked it on to the horns of the hames.  Then he went inside (there
+was another light there) and brought out a bridle and an old pair of
+spurs that were hanging on the wall.  He buckled on the spurs at the
+chopping block, slipped the winkers off the leader and the bridle on,
+and took up the fencing-wire, and started out the gate with the horse.
+The boy gaped after him once, and then hurried to put up the other two
+horses.  He knew Harry Chatswood, and was in a hurry to see what he
+would be up to.
+
+There was a good crowd in town for the show, or the races, or a stock
+sale, or land ballot, or something; but most of them were tired, or at
+tea--or in the pubs--and the corners were deserted.  Observe how fate
+makes time and things fit when she wants to do a good turn--or play a
+practical joke.  Harry Chatswood, for instance, didn't know anything
+about the hypnotic business.
+
+It was the corners of the main street or road and the principal short
+cross street, and the van was opposite the pub stables in the main
+street.  Harry crossed the streets diagonally to the opposite corner,
+in a line with the van.  There he slipped the bar down over the
+horse's rump, and fastened one end of the wire on to the ring of it.
+Then he walked back to the van, carrying the wire and letting the
+coils go wide, and, as noiselessly as possible, made a loop in the
+loose end and slipped it over the hooks on the end of the pole.
+("Unnecessary detail!" my contemporaries will moan, "Overloaded
+with uninteresting details!"  But that's because they haven't got the
+details--and it's the details that go.)  Then Harry skipped back to
+his horse, jumped on, gathered up the bridle reins, and used his
+spurs.  There was a swish and a clang, a scrunch and a clock-clock and
+rattle of wheels, and a surprised human sound; then a bump and a
+shout--for there was no underground drainage, and the gutters belonged
+to the Stone Age.  There was a swift clocking and rattle, more shouts,
+another bump, and a yell.  And so on down the longish main street.
+The stable-boy, who had left the horses in his excitement, burst into
+the bar, shouting, "The Hypnertism's on, the Mesmerism's on!  Ole
+Mae's van's runnin' away with him without no horses all right!"  The
+crowd scuffled out into the street; there were some unfortunate horses
+hanging up of course at the panel by the pub trough, and the first to
+get to them jumped on and rode; the rest ran.  The hall--where they
+were clearing the willing professor out in favour of a "darnce"--and
+the other pubs decanted their contents, and chance souls skipped for
+the verandas of weather-board shanties out of which other souls popped
+to see the runaway.  They saw a weird horseman, or rather, something
+like a camel (for Harry rode low, like Tod Sloan with his long back
+humped--for effect)--apparently fleeing for its life in a veil of
+dust, along the long white road, and some forty rods behind, an
+unaccountable tilted coach careered in its own separate cloud of dust.
+And from it came the shouts and yells.  Men shouted and swore, women
+screamed for their children, and kids whimpered.  Some of the men
+turned with an oath and stayed the panic with:
+
+"It's only one of them flamin' motor-cars, you fools."
+
+It might have been, and the yells the warning howls of a motorist who
+had burst or lost his honk-kook and his head.
+
+"It's runnin' away!"  or "The toff's mad or drunk!"  shouted
+others.  "It'll break its crimson back over the bridge."
+
+"Let it!" was the verdict of some.  "It's all the crimson carnal
+things are good for."
+
+But the riders still rode and the footmen ran.  There was a clatter of
+hoofs on the short white bridge looming ghostly ahead, and then, at a
+weird interval, the rattle and rumble of wheels, with no hoof-beats
+accompanying.  The yells grew fainter.  Harry's leader was a good
+horse, of the rather heavy coachhorse breed, with a little of the
+racing blood in her, but she was tired to start with, and only
+excitement and fright at the feel of the "pull" of the twisting wire
+kept her up to that speed; and now she was getting winded, so half a
+mile or so beyond the bridge Harry thought it had gone far enough, and
+he stopped and got down.  The van ran on a bit, of course, and the
+loop of the wire slipped off the hooks of the pole.  The wire recoiled
+itself roughly along the dust nearly to the heels of Harry's horse.
+Harry grabbed up as much of the wire as he could claw for, took the
+mare by the neck with the other hand, and vanished through the dense
+fringe of scrub off the road, till the wire caught and pulled him up;
+he stood still for a moment, in the black shadow on the edge of a
+little clearing, to listen.  Then he fumbled with the wire until he
+got it untwisted, cast it off, and moved off silently with the mare
+across the soft rotten ground, and left her in a handy bush stockyard,
+to be brought back to the stables at a late hour that night--or rather
+an early hour next morning--by a jackaroo stable-boy who would have
+two half-crowns in his pocket and afterthought instructions to look
+out for that wire and hide it if possible.
+
+Then Harry Chatswood got back quickly, by a roundabout way, and walked
+into the bar of the Royal, through the back entrance from the stables,
+and stared, and wanted to know where all the chaps had gone to, and
+what the noise was about, and whose trap had run away, and if anybody
+was hurt.
+
+The growing crowd gathered round the van, silent and awestruck, and
+some of them threw off their hats, and lost them, in their anxiety to
+show respect for the dead, or render assistance to the hurt, as men
+do, round a bad accident in the bush.  They got the old man out, and
+two of them helped him back along the road, with great solicitude,
+while some walked round the van, and swore beneath their breaths, or
+stared at it with open mouths, or examined it curiously, with their
+eyes only, and in breathless silence.  They muttered, and agreed, in
+the pale moonlight now showing, that the sounds of the horses' hoofs
+had only been "spirit-rappin' sounds;" and, after some more
+muttering, two of the stoutest, with subdued oaths, laid hold of the
+pole and drew the van to the side of the road, where it would be out
+of the way of chance night traffic.  But they stretched and rubbed
+their arms afterwards, and then, and on the way back, they swore to
+admiring acquaintances that they felt the "blanky 'lectricity"
+runnin' all up their arms and "elbers" while they were holding the
+pole, which, doubtless, they did--in imagination.
+
+They got old Mac back to the Royal, with sundry hasty whiskies on the
+way.  He was badly shaken, both physically, mentally, and in his
+convictions, and, when he'd pulled himself together, he had little to
+add to what they already knew.  But he confessed that, when he got
+under his possum rug in the van, he couldn't help thinking of the
+professor and his creepy (it was "creepy," or "uncanny," or
+"awful," or "rum" with 'em now)--his blanky creepy hypnotism; and
+he (old Mac) had just laid on his back comfortable, and stretched his
+legs out straight, and his arms down straight by his sides, and drew
+long, slow breaths; and tried to fix his mind on nothing--as the
+professor had told him when he was "operatin' on him" in the hall.
+Then he began to feel a strange sort of numbness coming over him, and
+his limbs went heavy as lead, and he seemed to be gettin'
+light-headed.  Then, all on a sudden, his arms seemed to begin to
+lift, and just when he was goin' to pull 'em down the van started as
+they had heard and seen it.  After a while he got on to his knees and
+managed to wrench a corner; of the front curtain clear of the button
+and get his head out.  And there was the van going helter-skelter, and
+feeling like Tam o'Shanter's mare (the old man said), and he on her
+barebacked.  And there was no horses, but a cloud of dust--or a
+spook--on ahead, and the bare pole steering straight for it, just as
+the professor had said it would be.  The old man thought he was going
+to be taken clear across the Never-Never country and left to roast on
+a sandhill, hundreds of miles from anywhere, for his sins, and he said
+he was trying to think of a prayer or two all the time he was yelling.
+They handed him more whisky from the publican's own bottle.  Hushed
+and cautious inquiries for the Professor (with a big P now) elicited
+the hushed and cautious fact that he had gone to bed.  But old Mac
+caught the awesome name and glared round, so they hurriedly filled out
+another for him, from the boss's bottle.  Then there was a slight
+commotion.  The housemaid hurried scaredly in to the bar behind and
+whispered to the boss.  She had been startled nearly out of her wits
+by the Professor suddenly appearing at his bedroom door and calling
+upon her to have a stiff nobbler of whisky hot sent up to his room.
+The jackaroo yard-boy, aforesaid, volunteered to take it up, and while
+he was gone there were hints of hysterics from the kitchen, and the
+boss whispered in his turn to the crowd over the bar.  The jackaroo
+just handed the tray and glass in through the partly opened door, had
+a glimpse of pyjamas, and, after what seemed an interminable wait, he
+came tiptoeing into the bar amongst its awe-struck haunters with an
+air of great mystery, and no news whatever.
+
+They fixed old Mac on a shake-down in the Commercial Room, where he'd
+have light and some overflow guests on the sofas for company.  With a
+last whisky in the bar, and a stiff whisky by his side on the floor,
+he was understood to chuckle to the effect that he knew he was all
+right when he'd won "the keystone o' the brig."  Though how a wooden
+bridge with a level plank floor could have a keystone I don't
+know--and they were too much impressed by the event of the evening to
+inquire.  And so, with a few cases of hysterics to occupy the
+attention of the younger women, some whimpering of frightened children
+and comforting or chastened nagging by mothers, some unwonted prayers
+muttered secretly and forgettingly, and a good deal of subdued
+blasphemy, Cunnamulla sank to its troubled slumbers--some of the
+sleepers in the commercial and billiard-rooms and parlours at the
+Royal, to start up in a cold sweat, out of their beery and hypnotic
+nightmares, to find Harry Chatswood making elaborate and fearsome
+passes over them with his long, gaunt arms and hands, and a flaming
+red table-cloth tied round his neck.
+
+To be done with old Mac, for the present. He made one or two more
+trips, but always by daylight, taking care to pick up a swagman or a
+tramp when he had no passenger; but his "conveections" had had too
+much of a shaking, so he sold his turnout (privately and at a
+distance, for it was beginning to be called "the haunted van") and
+returned to his teams--always keeping one of the lads with him for
+company.  He reckoned it would take the devil's own hypnotism to move
+a load of fencingwire, or pull a wool-team of bullocks out of a bog;
+and before he invoked the ungodly power, which he let them believe he
+could--he'd stick there and starve till he and his bullocks died a
+"natural" death.  (He was a bit Irish--as all Scots are--back on one
+side.)
+
+But the strangest is to come.  The Professor, next morning, proved
+uncomfortably unsociable, and though he could have done a roaring
+business that night--and for a week of nights after, for that
+matter--and though he was approached several times, he, for some
+mysterious reason known only to himself, flatly refused to give one
+more performance, and said he was leaving the town that day.  He
+couldn't get a vehicle of any kind, for fear, love, or money, until
+Harry Chatswood, who took a day off, volunteered, for a stiff
+consideration, to borrow a buggy and drive him (the Professor) to the
+next town towards the then railway terminus, in which town the
+Professor's fame was not so awesome, and where he might get a lift to
+the railway.  Harry ventured to remark to the Professor once or twice
+during the drive that "there was a rum business with old Mac's van
+last night," but he could get nothing out of him, so gave it best,
+and finished the journey in contemplative silence.
+
+Now, the fact was that the Professor had been the most surprised and
+startled man in Cunnamulla that night; and he brooded over the thing
+till he came to the conclusion that hypnotism was a dangerous power
+to meddle with unless a man was physically and financially strong and
+carefree--which he wasn't.  So he threw it up.
+
+He learnt the truth, some years later, from a brother of Harry
+Chatswood, in a Home or Retreat for Geniuses, where "friends were
+paying," and his recovery was so sudden that it surprised and
+disappointed the doctor and his friend, the manager of the home.
+As it was, the Professor had some difficulty in getting out of it.
+
+
+
+
+THE EXCISEMAN
+
+
+
+Harry Chatswood, mail contractor (and several other things), was
+driving out from, say, Georgeville to Croydon, with mails, parcels,
+and only one passenger--a commercial traveller, who had shown himself
+unsociable, and close in several other ways.  Nearly half-way to a
+place that was half-way between the halfway house and the town,
+Harry overhauled "Old Jack," a local character (there are many
+well-known characters named "Old Jack") and gave him a lift as a
+matter of course.
+
+"Hello!  Is that you, Jack?"  in the gathering dusk.
+
+
+"Yes, Harry."
+
+"Then jump up here."
+
+Harry was good-natured and would give anybody a lift if he could.
+
+Old Jack climbed up on the box-seat, between Harry and the traveller,
+who grew rather more stand- (or rather _sit_-) offish, wrapped
+himself closer in his overcoat, and buttoned his cloak of silence and
+general disgust to the chin button.  Old Jack got his pipe to work and
+grunted, and chatted, and exchanged bush compliments with Harry
+comfortably.  And so on to where they saw the light of a fire outside
+a hut ahead.
+
+"Let me down here, Harry," said Old Jack uneasily, "I owe Mother
+Mac fourteen shillings for drinks, and I haven't got it on me, and
+I've been on the spree back yonder, and she'll know it, an' I don't
+want to face her.  I'll cut across through the paddock and you can
+pick me up on the other side."
+
+Harry thought a moment.
+
+"Sit still, Jack," he said.  "I'll fix that all right."
+
+He twisted and went down into his trouser-pocket, the reins in one
+hand, and brought up a handful of silver.  He held his hand down to
+the coach lamp, separated some of the silver from the rest by a sort
+of sleight of hand--or rather sleight of fingers--and handed the
+fourteen shillings over to Old Jack.
+
+"Here y'are, Jack.  Pay me some other time."
+
+"Thanks, Harry!" grunted Old Jack, as he twisted for his pocket.
+
+It was a cold night, the hint of a possible shanty thawed the
+traveller a bit, and he relaxed with a couple of grunts about the,
+weather and the road, which were received in a brotherly spirit.
+Harry's horses stopped of their own accord in front of the house, an
+old bark-and-slab whitewashed humpy of the early settlers' farmhouse
+type, with a plank door in the middle, one bleary-lighted window on
+one side, and one forbiddingly blind one, as if death were there, on
+the other.  It might have been.  The door opened, letting out a flood
+of lamp-light and firelight which blindly showed the sides of the
+coach and the near pole horse and threw the coach lamps and the rest
+into the outer darkness of the opposing bush.
+
+"Is that you, Harry?" called a voice and tone like Mrs Warren's of
+the Profession.
+
+"It's me."
+
+A stoutly aggressive woman appeared.  She was rather florid, and
+looked, moved and spoke as if she had been something in the city in
+other years, and had been dumped down in the bush to make money in
+mysterious ways; had married, mated--or got herself to be supposed to
+be married--for convenience, and continued to make money by mysterious
+means.  Anyway, she was "Mother Mac" to the bush, but, in the bank
+in the "town," and in the stores where she dealt, she was _Mrs_
+Mac, and there was always a promptly propped chair for her.  She was,
+indeed, the missus of no other than old Mac, the teamster of hypnotic
+fame, and late opposition to Harry Chatswood.  Hence, perhaps, part of
+Harry's hesitation to pull up, farther back, and his generosity to Old
+Jack.
+
+Mrs or Mother Mac sold refreshments, from a rough bush dinner at
+eighteenpence a head to passengers, to a fly-blown bottle of
+ginger-ale or lemonade, hot in hot weather from a sunny fly-specked
+window.  In between there was cold corned beef, bread and butter, and
+tea, and (best of all if they only knew it) a good bush billy of
+coffee on the coals before the fire on cold wet nights.  And outside
+of it all, there was cold tea, which, when confidence was established,
+or they knew one of the party, she served hushedly in cups without
+saucers; for which she sometimes apologized, and which she took into
+her murderous bedroom to fill, and replenish, in its darkest and most
+felonious corner from homicidal-looking pots, by candle-light.  You'd
+think you were in a cheap place, where you shouldn't be, in the city.
+
+Harry and his passengers got down and stretched their legs, and while
+Old Jack was guardedly answering a hurriedly whispered inquiry of
+the traveller, Harry took the opportunity to nudge Mrs Mac, and
+whisper in her ear:
+
+"Look out, Mrs Mac!--Exciseman!"
+
+"The devil he is!" whispered she.
+
+"Ye-e-es!" whispered Harry.
+
+"All right, Harry!" she whispered.  "Never a word!  I'll take care
+of him, bless his soul."
+
+After a warm at the wide wood fire, a gulp of coffee and a bite or two
+at the bread and meat, the traveller, now thoroughly thawed,
+stretched himself and said:
+
+"Ah, well, Mrs Mac, haven't you got anything else to offer us?"
+
+"And what more would you be wanting?" she snapped.  "Isn't the
+bread and meat good enough for you?"
+
+"But--but--you know---" he suggested lamely.
+
+"Know?--I know!--What do _I_ know?"  A pause, then, with
+startling suddenness, "Phwat d'y' mean?"
+
+"No offence, Mrs Mac--no offence; but haven't you got something in
+the way of--of a drink to offer us?"
+
+"Dhrink!  Isn't the coffee good enough for ye?  I paid two and six a
+pound for ut, and the milk new from the cow this very evenin'--an' th'
+water rain-water."
+
+"But--but--you know what I mean, Mrs Mac."
+
+"An' I doan't know what ye mean.  _Phwat do ye mean_?  I've
+asked ye that before.  What are ye dhrivin' at, man--out with it!"
+
+"Well, I mean a little drop of the right stuff," he said, nettled.
+Then he added: "No offence--no harm done."
+
+"O-o-oh!" she said, illumination bursting in upon her brain.  "It's
+the dirrty drink ye're afther, is it?  Well, I'll tell ye, first for
+last, that we doan't keep a little drop of the right stuff nor a
+little drop of the wrong stuff in this house.  It's a honest house,
+an' me husband's a honest harrd-worrkin' carrier, as he'd soon let ye
+know if he was at home this cold night, poor man.  No dirrty drink
+comes into this house, nor goes out of it, I'd have ye know."
+
+"Now, now, Mrs Mac, between friends, I meant no offence; but it's a
+cold night, and I thought you might keep a bottle for medicine--or in
+case of accident--or snake-bite, you know--they mostly do in the
+bush."
+
+"Medicine!  And phwat should we want with medicine?  This isn't a
+five-guinea private hospital.  We're clean, healthy people, I'd have
+ye know.  There's a bottle of painkiller, if that's what ye want, and
+a packet of salts left--maybe they'd do ye some good.  An' a bottle of
+eye-water, an' something to put in your ear for th' earache--maybe
+ye'll want 'em both before ye go much farther."
+
+"But, Mrs Mac--"
+
+"No, no more of it!" she said.  "I tell ye that if it's a nip ye're
+afther, ye'll have to go on fourteen miles to the pub in the town.
+Ye're coffee's gittin' cowld, an' it's eighteenpence each to
+passengers I charge on a night like this; Harry Chatswood's the driver
+an' welcome, an' Ould Jack's an ould friend."  And she flounced round
+to clatter her feelings amongst the crockery on the dresser--just as
+men make a great show of filling and lighting their pipes in the
+middle of a barney.  The table, by the way, was set on a brown holland
+cloth, with the brightest of tin plates for cold meals, and the
+brightest of tin pint-pots for the coffee (the crockery was in reserve
+for hot meals and special local occasions) and at one side of the wide
+fire-place hung an old-fashioned fountain, while in the other stood a
+camp-oven; and billies and a black kerosene-tin hung evermore over the
+fire from sooty chains.  These, and a big bucket-handled frying-pan
+and a few rusty convict-time arms on the slab walls, were mostly to
+amuse jackaroos and jackarooesses, and let them think they were
+getting into the Australian-dontcherknow at last.
+
+Harry Chatswood took the opportunity (he had a habit of taking
+opportunities of this sort) to whisper to Old Jack:
+
+"Pay her the fourteen bob, Jack, and have done with it.  She's got
+the needle to-night all right, and damfiknow what for.  But the sight
+of your fourteen bob might bring her round."  And Old Jack--as was
+his way--blundered obediently and promptly right into the hole that
+was shown him.
+
+"Well, Mrs Mae," he said, getting up from the table and slipping his
+hand into his pocket.  "I don't know what's come over yer to-night,
+but, anyway--" Here he put the money down on the table.  "There's
+the money I owe yer for--for---"
+
+"For what?"  she demanded, turning on him with surprising swiftness
+for such a stout woman.
+
+"The--the fourteen bob I owed for them drinks when Bill Hogan and
+me---"
+
+"You don't owe me no fourteen bob for dhrinks, you dirty blaggard!
+Are ye mad?  You got no drink off of me.  Phwat d'ye mean?"
+
+"Beg--beg pardin, Mrs Mac," stammered Old Jack, very much taken
+aback; "but the--yer know--the fourteen bob, anyway, I owed you
+when--that night when me an' Bill Hogan an' yer sister-in-law, Mary
+Don---"
+
+"What?  Well, I--Git out of me house, ye low blaggard!  I'm a honest,
+respictable married woman, and so is me sister-in-law, Mary Donelly;
+and to think!--Git out of me door!" and she caught up the billy of
+coffee.  "Git outside me door, or I'll let ye have it in ye'r ugly
+face, ye low woolscourer--an' it's nearly bilin'."
+
+Old Jack stumbled dazedly out, and blind instinct got him on to the
+coach as the safest place.  Harry Chatswood had stood with his long,
+gaunt figure hung by an elbow to the high mantelshelf, all the time,
+taking alternate gulps from his pint of coffee and puffs from his
+pipe, and very calmly and restfully regarding the scene.
+
+"An' now," she said, "if the _gentleman's_ done, I'd thank him
+to pay--it's eighteenpence--an' git his overcoat on.  I've had enough
+dirty insults this night to last me a lifetime.  To think of it--the
+blaggard!" she said to the table, "an' me a woman alone in a place
+like this on a night like this!"
+
+The traveller calmly put down a two-shilling piece, as if the whole
+affair was the most ordinary thing in the world (for he was used to
+many bush things) and comfortably got into his overcoat.
+
+"Well, Mrs Mae, I never thought Old Jack was mad before," said Harry
+Chatswood.  "And I hinted to him," he added in a whisper.
+"Anyway" (out loudly), "you'll lend me a light, Mrs Mac, to have a
+look at that there swingle-bar of mine?"
+
+"With pleasure, Harry," she said, "for you're a white man, anyway.
+I'll bring ye a light.  An' all the lights in heaven if I could,
+an'--an' in the other place if they'd help ye."
+
+When he'd looked to the swingle-bar, and had mounted to his place and
+untwisted the reins from a side-bar, she cried:
+
+"An' as for them two, Harry, shpill them in the first creek you come
+to, an' God be good to you!  It's all they're fit for, the low
+blaggards, to insult an honest woman alone in the bush in a place like
+this."
+
+"All right, Mrs Mac," said Harry, cheerfully.  "Good night, Mrs
+Mac."
+
+"Good night, Harry, an' God go with ye, for the creeks are risen
+after last night's storm."  And Harry drove on and left her to think
+over it.
+
+She thought over it in a way that would have been unexpected to Harry,
+and would have made him uneasy, for he was really good-natured.  She
+sat down on a stool by the fire, and presently, after thinking over it
+a bit, two big, lonely tears rolled down the lonely woman's fair, fat,
+blonde cheeks in the firelight.
+
+"An' to think of Old Jack," she said.  "The very last man in the
+world I'd dreamed of turning on me.  But--but I always thought Old
+Jack was goin' a bit ratty, an' maybe I was a bit hard on him.  God
+forgive us all!"
+
+Had Harry Chatswood seen her then he would have been sorry he did it.
+Swagmen and broken-hearted new chums had met worse women than Mother
+Mac.
+
+But she pulled herself together, got up and bustled round.  She put on
+more wood, swept the hearth, put a parcel of fresh steak and
+sausages--brought by the coach--on to a clean plate on the table, and
+got some potatoes into a dish; for Chatswood had told her that her
+first and longest and favourite stepson was not far behind him with
+the bullock team.  Before she had finished the potatoes she heard the
+clock-clock of heavy wheels and the crack of the bullock whip coming
+along the dark bush track.
+
+But the very next morning a man riding back from Croydon called, and
+stuck his head under the veranda eaves with a bush greeting, and she
+told him all about it.
+
+He straightened up, and tickled the back of his head with his little
+finger, and gaped at her for a minute.
+
+"Why," he said, "that wasn't no excise officer.  I know him well--I
+was drinking with him at the Royal last night afore we went to bed,
+an' had a nip with him this morning afore we started.  Why! that's
+Bobby Howell, Burns and Bridges' traveller, an' a good sort when he
+wakes up, an' willin' with the money when he does good biz, especially
+when there's a chanst of a drink on a long road on a dark night."
+
+"That Harry Chatswood again!  The infernal villain," she cried, with
+a jerk of her arm.  "But I'll be even with him, the dirrty blaggard.
+An' to think--I always knew Old Jack was a white man an'--to think!
+There's fourteen shillin's gone that Old Jack would have paid me, an'
+the traveller was good for three shillin's f'r the nips, an'--but Old
+Jack will pay me next time, and I'll be even with Harry Chatswood, the
+dirrty mail carter.  I'll take it out of him in parcels--I'll be even
+with him."
+
+She never saw Old Jack again with fourteen shillings, but she got even
+with Harry Chatswood, and--- But I'll tell you about that some other
+time.  Time for a last smoke before we turn in.
+
+
+
+
+MATESHIP IN SHAKESPEARE'S ROME
+
+
+
+How we do misquote sayings, or misunderstand them when quoted rightly!
+For instance, we "wait for something to turn up, like Micawber,"
+careless or ignorant of the fact that Micawber worked harder than all
+the rest put together for the leading characters' sakes; he was the
+chief or only instrument in straightening out of the sadly mixed state
+of things--and he held his tongue till the time came.  Moreover--and
+"_Put a pin in that spot, young man_," as Dr "Yark" used to
+say--when there came a turn in the tide of the affairs of Micawber, he
+took it at the flood, and it led on to fortune.  He became a
+hardworking settler, a pioneer--a respected early citizen and
+magistrate in this bright young Commonwealth of ours, my masters!
+
+And, by the way, and strictly between you and me, I have a shrewd
+suspicion that Uriah Heep wasn't the only cad in David Copperfield.
+
+Brutus, the originator of the saying, took the tide at the flood, and
+it led him and his friends on to death, or--well, perhaps, under the
+circumstances, it was all the same to Brutus and his old mate,
+Cassius.
+
+    And this, my masters, brings me home,
+    Bush-born bard, to Ancient Rome.
+
+And there's little difference in the climate, or the men--save in the
+little matter of ironmongery--and no difference at all in the women.
+
+We'll pass over the accident that happened to Caesar.  Such accidents
+had happened to great and little Caesars hundreds of times before, and
+have happened many times since, and will happen until the end of time,
+both in "sport" (in plays) and in earnest:
+
+    Cassius:....How many ages hence
+            Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
+            In states unborn and accents yet unknown?
+
+    Brutus: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,
+            That now at Pompey's basis lies along
+            No worthier than the dust!
+
+Shakespeare hadn't Australia and George Rignold in his mind's eye when
+he wrote that.
+
+    Cassius: So oft as that shall be,
+             So often shall the knot of us be call'd
+             The men that gave their country liberty.
+
+Well, be that as it will, I'm with Brutus too, irrespective of the
+merits of the case.  Antony spoke at the funeral, with free and
+generous permission, and see what he made of it.  And why shouldn't I?
+and see what I'll make of it.
+
+Antony, after sending abject and uncalled-for surrender, and
+grovelling unasked in the dust to Brutus and his friends as no
+straight mate should do for another, dead or alive--and after taking
+the blood-stained hands of his alleged friend's murderers--got
+permission to speak.  To speak for his own ends or that paltry,
+selfish thing called "revenge," be it for one's self or one's
+friend.
+
+"Brutus, I want a word with you," whispered Cassius.  "Don't let
+him speak!  You don't know how he might stir up the mob with what he
+says."
+
+But Brutus had already given his word:
+
+    Antony: That's all I seek:
+            And am moreover suitor that I may
+            Produce his body to the market place,
+            And in the pulpit, as becomes a friend,
+            Speak in the order of his funeral.
+
+    Brutus: You shall, Mark Antony.
+
+And now, strong in his right, as he thinks, and trusting to the honour
+of Antony, he only stipulates that he (Brutus) shall go on to the
+platform first and explain things; and that Antony shall speak all the
+good he can of Caesar, but not abuse Brutus and his friends.
+
+And Antony (mark you) agrees and promises and breaks his promise
+immediately afterwards.  Maybe he was only gaining time for his good
+friend Octavius Caesar, but time gained by such foul means is time
+lost through all eternity.  Did Mark think of these things years
+afterwards in Egypt when he was doubly ruined and doubly betrayed to
+his good friend Octavius by that hot, jealous, selfish, shallow,
+shifty, strumpet, Cleopatra, and Octavius was after his scalp with a
+certainty of getting it?  He did--and he spoke of it, too.
+
+Brutus made his speech, a straightforward, manly speech in prose,
+and the gist of the matter was that he did what he did (killed Caesar),
+not because he loved Caesar less, but because he loved Rome more.
+And I believe he told the simple honest truth.
+
+Then he acts as Antony's chairman, or introducer, in a manly
+straightforward manner, and then he goes off and leaves the stage to
+him, which is another generous act; though it was lucky for Brutus, as
+it happened afterwards, that he was out of the way.
+
+Mark Antony gets all the limelight and blank verse.  He had the "gift
+of the gab" all right.  Old Cassius referred to it later on in one of
+those "words-before-blows" barneys they had on the battlefield where
+they hurt each other a damned sight more with their tongues than they
+did with their swords afterwards.
+
+We've all heard of Antony's speech:
+
+       I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
+
+Which was a lie to start with.
+
+       The evil that men do lives after them,
+       The good is oft interred with their bones.
+
+Which is not so true in these days of newspapers and magazines.  And
+so on.  He says that Brutus and his friends are honourable men about
+nine times in his short speech.  Now, was Mark Antony an honourable
+man?
+
+And then the flap-doodle about dead Caesar's wounds, and their
+poor dumb mouths, and the people kissing them, and dipping their
+handkerchiefs in his sacred blood.  All worthy of our Purves trying
+to pump tears out of a jury.
+
+But it fetched the crowd; it always did, it always has done, it always
+does, and it always will do.  And the hint of Caesar's will, and the
+open abuse of Brutus and Co. when he saw that he was safe, and the
+cheap anti-climax of the reading of the will.  Nothing in this line
+can be too cheap for the crowd, as witness the melodramas of our own
+civilized and enlightened times.
+
+Antony was a noble Purves.
+
+And the mob rushed off to burn houses, as it has always done, and will
+always do when it gets a chance--it tried to burn mine more than once.
+
+The quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius is one of the best scenes
+in Shakespeare.  It is great from the sublime to the ridiculous--you
+must read it for yourself.  It seems that Brutus objected to
+Cassius's, or one of his off-side friends' methods of raising the
+wind--he reckoned it was one of the very things they killed Julius
+Caesar for; and Cassius, loving Brutus more than a brother, is very
+much hurt about it.  I can't make out what the trouble really was
+about and I don't suppose either Cassius or Brutus was clear as to
+what it was all about either.  It's generally the way when friends
+fall out.  It seems also that Brutus thinks that Cassius refused to
+lend him a few quid to pay his legions, and, you know, it's an
+unpardonable crime for one mate to refuse another a few quid when he's
+in a hole; but it seems that the messenger was but a fool who brought
+Cassius's answer back.  It is generally the messenger who is to blame,
+when friends make it up after a quarrel that was all their own fault.
+Messengers had an uncomfortable time in those days, as witness the
+case of the base slave who had to bring Cleopatra the news of Antony's
+marriage with Octavia.
+
+But the quarrel scene is great for its deep knowledge of the hearts of
+men in matters of man to man--of man friend to man friend--and it is
+as humanly simple as a barney between two old bush mates that
+threatens to end in a bloody fist-fight and separation for life, but
+chances to end in a beer.  This quarrel threatened to end in the death
+of either Brutus or Cassius or a set-to between their two armies, just
+at the moment when they all should have been knit together against the
+forces of Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar; but it ended in a beer, or
+its equivalent, a bowl of wine.
+
+Earlier in the quarrel, where Brutus asks why, after striking down the
+foremost man in all the world for supporting land agents and others,
+should they do the same thing and contaminate their fingers with base
+bribes?
+
+             I'd rather be a dog and bay the moon,
+             Than such a Roman.
+
+Cassius says:
+
+             Brutus, bait not me
+             I'll not endure it: you forget yourself,
+             To hedge me in; I am a soldier, I,
+             Older in practice, abler than yourself
+             To make conditions.
+
+    Brutus:  Go to, you are not, Cassius.
+
+    Cassius: I am.
+
+    Brutus:  I say you are not.
+
+And so they get to it again until:
+
+    Cassius: Is it come to this?
+
+    Brutus:  You say you are a better soldier:
+             Let it appear so; make your vaunting true,
+             And it shall please me well: for mine own part,
+             I shall be glad to learn of noble men.
+
+    Cassius: You wrong me every way; you wrong me, Brutus;
+             I said, an elder soldier, not a better.
+             Did I say better?
+
+(What big boys they were--and what big boys we all are!)
+    Brutus:  If you did, I care not.
+
+    Cassius: When Caesar lived he durst not thus have moved me.
+
+    Brutus:  Peace, peace! you durst not thus have tempted him.
+
+    Cassius: I durst not!
+
+    Brutus:  No.
+
+    Cassius: What! Durst not tempt him!
+
+    Brutus:  For your life you durst not.
+
+    Cassius: Do not presume too much upon my love;
+             I may do that I shall be sorry for.
+
+    Brutus:  You have done that you should be sorry for.
+
+
+And so on till he gets to the matter of the refused quids, which is
+cleared up at the expense of the messenger.
+
+    Cassius: .... Brutus hath rived my heart
+             A friend should bear his friend's infirmities,
+             But Brutus makes mine greater than they are.
+
+    Brutus:  I do not, till you practise them on me.
+
+    Cassius: You love me not.
+
+    Brutus:  I do not like your faults.
+
+    Cassius: A friendly eye could never see such faults.
+
+    Brutus:  A flatterer's would not, though they do appear
+             As huge as high Olympus.
+
+Then Cassius lets himself go.  He calls on Antony and young Octavius
+and all the rest of 'em to come and be revenged on him alone, for he's
+tired of the world ("Cassius is aweary of the world," he says).
+He's hated by one he loves (that's Brutus).  He's braved by his
+"brother" (Brutus), checked like a bondman, and Brutus keeps an eye
+on all his faults and puts 'em down in a note-book, and learns 'em
+over and gets 'em off by memory to cast in his teeth.  He offers
+Brutus his dagger and bare breast and wants Brutus to take out his
+heart, which, he says, is richer than all the quids--or rather
+gold--which Brutus said he wouldn't lend him.  He wants Brutus to
+strike him as he did Caesar, for he reckons that when Brutus hated
+Caesar worst he loved him far better than ever he loved Cassius.
+
+Remember these men were Southerners, like ourselves, not cold-blooded
+Northerners--and, in spite of the seemingly effeminate Italian
+temperament, as brave as our men were at Elands River.  The reason of
+Brutus's seeming coldness and hardness during the quarrel is set forth
+in a startling manner later on, as only the greatest poet in this
+world could do it.
+
+Brutus tells him kindly to put up his pig-sticker (and button his
+shirt) and he could be just as mad or good-tempered as he liked, and
+do what he liked, Brutus wouldn't mind him:
+
+             .... Dishonour shall be humour.
+             O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb
+             That carries anger as the flint bears fire,
+             Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark
+             And straight is cold again.
+
+Whereupon Cassius weeps because he thinks Brutus is laughing at him.
+
+             Hath Cassius lived
+             To be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus,
+             When grief and blood ill-temper'd vexeth him.
+
+    Brutus:  When I spoke that, I was ill-temper'd too.
+
+    Cassius: Do you confess so much?  Give me your hand.
+
+    Brutus:  And my heart too.
+
+Then Cassius explains that he got his temper from his mother (as I did
+mine).
+
+    Cassius: O Brutus!
+
+    Brutus:  What's the matter? [Shakespeare should have added `now.']
+
+    Cassius: Have not you love enough to bear with me,
+             When that rash humour which my mother gave me
+             Makes me forgetful?
+
+    Brutus:  Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth,
+             When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,
+             He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so.
+
+And all this on the brink of disaster and death.
+
+But here comes a rare touch, and we might as well quote it in full.
+
+Mind you, I am following Shakespeare, and not history, which is mostly
+lies.
+
+A great poet's instinct might be nearer the truth; after all.  Of
+course scholars know that Macbeth (or Macbethad) reigned for upwards
+of twenty years in Scotland a wise and a generous king--so much so
+that he was called "Macbathad the Liberal," and it was Duncan who
+found his way to the throne by way of murder; but it didn't fit in
+with Shakespeare's plans, and--anyway that's only a little matter
+between the ghosts of Bill and Mac which was doubtless fixed up long
+ago.  More likely they thought it such a one-millionth part of a
+trifle that they never dreamed of thinking of mentioning it.
+
+                               (Noise within.)
+
+    Poet (within): Let me go in to see the generals; There is some
+                   grudge between 'em--'tis not meet
+                   They be alone.
+
+    Lucilius (within): You shall not come to them.
+
+    Poet (within): Nothing but death shall stay me.
+
+("Within" in this case is, of course, without--outside the tent
+where Lucilius and Titinius are on guard.)
+
+                        Enter POET.
+
+    Cassius: How now!  What's the matter?
+
+    Poet:    For shame, you generals!  What do you mean?
+             Love, and be friends, as two such men should be:
+             For I have seen more years, I'm sure, than ye.
+
+    Cassius: Ha, ha! how vilely doth this cynic rhyme!
+
+    Brutus:  Get you hence, sirrah; saucy fellow, hence!
+
+    Cassius:  Bear with him, Brutus; 'tis his fashion.
+
+    Brutus:  I'll know his humour when he knows his time:
+             What should the wars do with these jingling fools?
+             Companion, hence!
+
+    Cassius: Away, away, be gone!
+
+                                (Exit POET.)
+
+
+Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit a black eye
+(_Lawson_).  Shakespeare was ever rough on poets--but stay!
+Consider that this great world of Rome and all the men and women in it
+were created by a "jingling fool" and a master of bad--not to say
+execrable--rhymes, and his name was William Shakespeare.  You need to
+sit down and think awhile after that.
+
+Brutus sends Lucilius and Titinius to bid the commanders lodge their
+companies for the night, and then all come to him.  Then he gives
+Cassius a shock and strikes him to the heart for his share in the
+quarrel.  It is almost directly after the row, when they have kicked
+out the "jingling fool" of a poet.  Cassius does not know that
+Brutus has to-day received news of the death, in Rome, of his good and
+true wife Portia, who, during a fit of insanity, brought on by her
+grief and anxiety for Brutus, and in the absence of her attendant, has
+poisoned herself--or "swallowed fire," as Shakespeare has it.
+
+    Brutus (to Lucius, his servant): Lucius, a bowl of wine!
+    Cassius: I did not think you could have been so angry.
+    Brutus:  O Cassius, I am sick of many griefs.
+
+    Cassius: Of your philosophy you make no use,
+             If you give place to accidental evils.
+
+    Brutus:  No man bears sorrow better:--Portia is dead.
+
+    Cassius: Ha! Portia!
+
+    Brutus:  She is dead.
+
+    Cassius: How 'scaped I killing when I cross'd you so!
+             O insupportable and touching loss!
+             Upon what sickness?
+
+    Brutus:  Impatient of my absence,
+             And grief that young Octavius with Mark Antony
+             Have made themselves so strong: for with her death
+             That tidings came; with this she fell distract,
+             And, her attendants absent, swallowed fire.
+
+    Cassius: And died so?
+
+    Brutus:  Even so.
+
+    Cassius: O, ye immortal gods!
+
+(Enter Lucius, with a jar of wine, a goblet, and a taper.)
+    Brutus:  Speak no more of her.  Give me a bowl of wine:
+             In this I bury all unkindness, Cassius.
+                                  (Drinks.)
+
+    Cassius: My heart is thirsty for that noble pledge.
+             Fill, Lucius, till the wine o'erswell the cup;
+             I cannot drink too much of Brutus' love.
+                                   (Drinks.)
+
+You ought to read that scene carefully.  It will do no one any harm.
+It did me a lot of good one time, when I was about to quarrel with a
+friend whose heart was sick with many griefs that I knew nothing of at
+the time.  You never know what's behind.
+
+Titinius and Messala come in, and proceed to discuss the situation.
+
+    Brutus:  Come in, Titinius!!  Welcome, good Messala.
+             Now sit we close about this taper here,
+             And call in question our necessities.
+
+    Cassius (on whom the wine seems to have taken some effect):
+             Portia, art thou gone?
+
+    Brutus:  No more, I pray you.
+             Messala, I have here received letters,
+             That young Octavius and Mark Antony
+             Come down upon us with a mighty power,
+             Bending their expedition towards Philippi.
+
+Messala has also letters to the same purpose, and they have likewise
+news of the murder, or execution, of upwards of a hundred senators in
+Rome.
+
+    Cassius: Cicero one!
+    Messala: Cicero is dead.
+
+Poor Brutus!  His heart had cause to be sick of many griefs that day.
+Messala thinks he has news to break, and Brutus draws him out.  How
+many and many a man and woman, with a lump in the throat, have
+broken sad and bad news since that day, and started out to do it in
+the same old gentle way:
+
+    Messala: Had you your letters from your wife, my lord?
+
+    Brutus:  No, Messala.
+
+    Messala: Nor nothing in your letters writ of her?
+
+    Brutus:  Nothing, Messala.
+
+    Messala: That, methinks, is strange.
+
+    Brutus:  Why ask you?  Hear you aught of her in yours?
+
+Maybe it strikes Messala like a flash that Brutus is in no need of any
+more bad news just now, and it had better be postponed till after the
+battle:
+
+    Messala: No, my lord.
+
+    Brutus:  Now, as you are a Roman, tell me true.
+
+    Messala: Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell:
+             For certain she is dead, and by strange manner.
+
+    Brutus:  Why, farewell, Portia.  We must die, Messala:
+             With meditating that she must die once
+             I have the patience to endure it now.
+
+Poor Messala comes to the scratch again rather lamely with a little
+weak flattery: "Even so great men great losses should endure;" and
+Cassius says, rather mixedly--it might have been the wine--that he has
+as much strength in bearing trouble as Brutus has, and yet he couldn't
+bear it so.
+
+             I have as much of this in art as you,
+             But yet my nature could not bear it so.
+
+    Brutus:  Well, to our work alive.  What do you think
+             Of marching on Philippi presently?
+
+Brutus was a strong man.  Portia's spirit must bide a while.  They
+discuss a plan of campaign.  Cassius is for waiting for the enemy to
+seek them and so get through his tucker and knock his men up, while
+they rest in a good position; but Brutus argues that the enemy will
+gather up the country people between Philippi and their camp and come
+on refreshed with added numbers and courage, and it would be better
+for them to meet him at Philippi with these people at their back.  The
+politics or inclination of the said country people didn't matter in
+those days.  "There is a tide in the affairs of men"--and so they
+decide to take it at the flood and float high on to the rocks at
+Philippi.  Ah well, it led on to immortality, if it didn't to fortune.
+
+Well, there's no more to say.  Brutus thinks that the main thing now
+is a little rest--in which you'll agree with him; and he sends for his
+night-shirt.
+
+             Good night, Titinius:  noble, noble Cassius,
+             Good night, and good repose!
+
+That old fool of a Cassius--remorseful old smooth-bore--is still a bit
+maudlin--maybe he had another swig at the wine when Shakespeare wasn't
+looking.
+
+    Cassius: O my dear brother!
+             This was an ill beginning of the night
+             Never come such division 'tween our souls!
+             Let it not, Brutus.
+
+    Brutus:  Everything is well.
+
+    Cassius: Good night, my lord.
+
+    Brutus:  Good sight, good brother.
+
+Titinius and Messala: Good night, Lord Brutus.
+
+    Brutus:  Farewell, every one.
+
+And Cassius is the man whom Caesar denounced as having a lean and
+hungry look: "Let me have men about me that are fat . . . such men
+are dangerous."  (Mr Archibald held with that--and he had a lean, if
+not a hungry, look too.)  When Antony put in a word for Cassius,
+Caesar said that he wished he was fatter anyhow.  "He thinks too
+much," Caesar said to Antony.  He read a lot; he could look through
+men; he never went to the theatre, and heard no music; he never smiled
+except as if grinning sarcastically at himself for "being moved to
+smile at anything."  Caesar said that such men were never at heart's
+ease while they could see a bigger man than themselves, and therefore
+such men were dangerous.  "Come on my right hand, for this ear is
+deaf, and tell me truly what thou think'st of him."  (That's a touch,
+for deafness in people affected that way is usually greater in the
+left ear.)
+
+When Lucilius returned from taking a message from Brutus to Cassius
+_re_ the loan of the fivers aforementioned and other matters--and
+before the arrival of Cassius with his horse and foot, and the
+quarrel--Brutus asked Lucilius what sort of a reception he had, and
+being told "With courtesy and respect enough," he remarked, "Thou
+hast described a hot friend cooling," and so on.  But Cassius will
+cool no more until death cools him to-morrow at Philippi.
+
+The rare gentleness of Brutus's character--and of the characters of
+thousands of other bosses in trouble--is splendidly, and ah! so
+softly, pictured in the tent with his servants after the departure of
+the others.  It is a purely domestic scene without a hint of home,
+women, or children--save that they themselves are big children.  The
+scene now has the atmosphere of a soft, sad nightfall, after a long,
+long, hot and weary day full of toil and struggle and trouble--though
+it is really well on towards morning.
+
+Lucius comes in with the gown.  Brutus says, "Give me the gown," and
+asks where his (Lucius's) musical instrument is, and Lucius replies
+that it's here in the tent.  Brutus notices that he speaks drowsily.
+"Poor knave, I blame thee not, thou are o'er-watched."  He tells him
+to call Claudius and some other of his men: "I'd have them sleep on
+cushions in my tent."  They come.  He tells them he might have to
+send them on business by and by to his "brother" Cassius, and bids
+them lie down and sleep, calling them sirs.  They say they'll stand
+and watch his pleasure.  "I will not have it so; lie down, good
+sirs."  He finds, in the pocket of his gown, a book he'd been hunting
+high and low for--and had evidently given Lucius a warm time
+about--and he draws Lucius's attention to the fact:
+
+             Look, Lucius, here's the book I sought for so:
+             I put it in the pocket of my gown.
+
+     Lucius: I was sure your lordship did not give it to me.
+
+     Brutus: Bear with me, good boy, I am much forgetful, etc.
+
+He asks Lucius if he can hold up his heavy eyes and touch his
+instrument a strain or two.  But better give it all--it's not long:
+
+     Lucius: Ay, my lord, an't please you.
+
+     Brutus: It does, my boy:
+             I trouble thee too much, but thou art willing.
+
+     Lucius: It is my duty, sir.
+
+     Brutus: I should not urge thy duty past thy might;
+             I know young bloods look for a time of rest.
+
+     Lucius: I have slept, my lord, already.
+
+     Brutus: It was well done; and thou shalt sleep again;
+             I will not hold thee long: if I do live,
+             I will be good to thee.  (Music, and a song.)
+             This is a sleepy tune.  O murderous slumber,
+             Lay'st thou thy leaden mace upon my boy
+             That plays thee music?  Gentle knave, good-night;
+             I will not do thee so much wrong to wake thee:
+             If thou dost nod, thou break'st thy instrument;
+             I'll take it from thee; and, good boy, good-night.
+             Let me see, let me see; is not the leaf turn'd down
+             Where I left reading?  Here it is, I think.
+                                                 (He sits down.)
+
+A man for all time!  How natural it all reads!  You must remember that
+he is a tired man after a long, strenuous day such as none of us ever
+know.  The fate of Rome and his--a much smaller matter--are hanging on
+the balance, and tomorrow will decide; but he is so mind-dulled and
+shoulder-weary under the tremendous burden of great things and of many
+griefs that he is almost apathetic; and over all is the cloud of a
+loss that he has not yet had time to realize.  He is self-hypnotized,
+so to speak, and his mind mercifully dulled for the moment on the Sea
+of Fatalism.
+
+                                         Enter GHOST of CAESAR
+
+     Brutus: How ill this taper burns!  Ha! who comes here?
+             I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
+             That shapes this monstrous apparition.
+             It comes upon me.  Art thou any thing?
+             Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil
+             That makest my blood cold, and my hair to stare?
+             Speak to me what thou art!
+
+His very "scare," or rather his cold blood and staring hair are as
+things apart, to be analysed and explained quickly and put aside.
+
+     Ghost:  Thy evil spirit, Brutus.
+
+That was frank enough, anyway.
+
+     Brutus: Why comest thou?
+
+     Ghost:  To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.
+
+     Brutus: Well; then I shall see thee again?
+
+     Ghost:  Ay, at Philippi.
+                                    (Vanishes.)
+
+That was very satisfactory, so far.  But Brutus, having taken heart,
+as he says, would hold more talk with the "ill spirit."  A ghost
+always needs to be taken quietly--it's no use getting excited and
+threshing round.  But Caesar's, being a new-chum ghost and bashful,
+was doubtless embarrassed by his cool, matter-of-fact reception, and
+left.  It didn't matter much.  They were to meet soon, above Philippi,
+on more level terms.
+
+But I cannot get away from the idea that Caesar's ghost's visit was
+made in a friendly spirit.  Who knows?  Perhaps Portia's spirit had
+sent it to comfort Brutus: her own being prevented from going for some
+reason only known to the immortal gods.
+
+Then Brutus wakes them all.
+
+     Lucius: The strings, my lord, are false.
+
+     Brutus: He thinks he is still at his instrument.
+             Lucius, awake!
+
+And after questioning them as to whether they cried out in their
+sleep, or saw anything, he bids the boy sleep again (it is easy for
+tired boys to sleep at will in camp) and sends two of the others to
+Cassius to bid him get his forces on the way early and he would
+follow.
+
+     Brutus: Go and commend me to my brother Cassius;
+             Bid him set on his powers betimes before,
+             And we will follow.
+
+     Varro and Claudius: It shall be done, my lord.
+
+For, being a wise soldier, as well as a brave and gentle one, he
+reckoned, no doubt, that it would be best to have a strong man in the
+rear until the field was actually reached, for the benefit of would-be
+deserters, and unconsidered trifles of country people-and maybe for
+another reason not totally disconnected with his erratic friend
+Cassius.
+
+Just one more scene, and a very different one, before we hurry on to
+the end, as they have done to Philippi.  It's the only scene in which
+those two unlucky Romans, Cassius and Brutus, seem to score.
+
+It is during the barney, or as Shakespeare calls it, the "parley"
+before the battle.  Those parleys never seemed to do any good--except
+to make matters worse, if I might put it like that: it's the same,
+under similar circumstances, right up to to-day.  Enter on one side
+Octavius Caesar, Mark Antony, and their pals and army; and, on the
+other, Brutus and Cassius and the friends and followers of their
+falling fortunes.
+
+     Brutus: Words before blows: is it so, countrymen?
+
+     Octavius: Not that we love words better, as you do.
+
+You see, Octavius starts it.
+
+Brutus lays himself open:
+
+     Brutus: Good words are better than bad strokes, Octavius.
+     Antony: In your bad strokes, Brutus, you give good words:
+             Witness the hole you made in Caesar's heart,
+             Crying, "Long live! hail, Caesar!"
+
+This is one for Brutus, though it contains a lie.  But Cassius comes
+to the rescue:
+
+     Cassius: Antony,
+              The posture of your blows are yet unknown,
+              But, for your words, they rob the Hybla bees
+              And leave them honeyless.
+
+     Antony:  Not stingless too.
+
+     Brutus:  O, yes, and soundless too;
+              For you have stol'n their buzzing, Antony,
+              And very wisely threat before you sting.
+
+That was one for Antony, and he gets mad.  "Villains!" he yells, and
+he abuses them about their vile daggers hacking one another in the
+sides of Caesar (a little matter that ought to be worn threadbare by
+now), and calls them apes and hounds and bondmen and curs, and O,
+flatterers (which seems to be worst of all in his opinion--for he
+isn't one, you know), and damns 'em generally.
+
+Old Cassius remarks, "Flatterers!"
+
+Then Octavius breaks loose, and draws his Roman chopper and waves it
+round, and spreads himself out over Caesar's three-and-thirty
+wounds--which ought to be given a rest by this time, but only seem to
+be growing in number--and swears that he won't put up said chopper
+till said wounds are avenged,
+
+              Or till another Caesar
+              Have added slaughter to the sword of traitors.
+
+Brutus says quietly that he cannot die by traitors unless he brings
+'em with him.  (He sent one to Egypt later on.)  Octavius says he
+hopes he wasn't born to die on Brutus's sword; and Brutus says, in
+effect, that even if he was any good he couldn't die more honourably.
+
+     Brutus:  O, if thou wert the noblest of thy strain,
+              Young man, thou couldst not die more honourable.
+
+     Cassius: A peevish schoolboy, worthless of such honour,
+              Join'd with a masker and a reveller!
+
+Octavius calls off his dogs, and tells them to come on to-day if they
+dare, or if not, when they have stomachs.
+
+     Cassius: Why, now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark!
+              The storm is up, and all is on the hazard.
+
+Yes, I reckon old Cassius ("old" in an affectionate sense) and Brutus
+came out top dogs from that scrap anyway.  And, yes, Antony _was_
+good at orating.  He was great at orating over dead men--especially
+dead "friends" (as he called his rivals) and dead enemies.  Brutus
+was "the noblest Roman of them all" when Antony came across him
+stiff later on.  Now when I die---
+
+Octavius, by the way, orated over Antony and his dusky hussy later on
+in Egypt, and they were the most "famous pair" in the world.  I
+wonder whether the grim humour of it struck Octavius _then_: but
+then that young man seemed to have but little brains and less humour.
+
+But now they go to see about settling the matter with ironmongery.
+You can imagine the fight; the heat and the dust, for it was spring in
+a climate like ours.  The bullocking, sweating, grunting, slaughter,
+the crack and clash and rattle as of fire-irons in a fender.  The bad
+Latin language; the running away and chasing _en masse_ and by
+individuals.  The mutual pauses, the truces or spells--"smoke-ho's"
+we'd call 'em--between masses and individuals.  The battered-in, lost,
+discarded or stolen helmets; the blood-stained, dinted, and loosened
+armour with bits missing, and the bloody and grotesque bandages.  The
+confusion amongst the soldiers, as it is to-day--the ignorance of one
+wing as to the fate of the other, of one party as to the fate of the
+other, of one individual as to the fate of another:
+
+     Brutus:  Ride, ride, Messala, ride, and give these bills [directions
+                 to officers]
+              Unto the legions on the other side:
+
+Poor Cassius, routed and in danger of being surrounded, and thinking
+Brutus is in the same plight, or a prisoner or dead--and that Titinius
+is taken or killed--gets his bondman, whose life he once saved, to kill
+him in return for his freedom.
+
+              Stand not to answer: here, take thou the hilts;
+              And when my face is cover 'd, as 'tis now,
+              Guide thou the sword.
+                       Caesar, thou art revenged,
+              Even with the sword that kill'd thee.
+
+Good-bye, Cassius, old chap!
+
+Titinius and Messala, coming too late, find Cassius dead; and
+Titinius, being left alone while Messala takes the news to Brutus,
+kills himself with Cassius's sword.  Titinius, farewell!
+
+Come Brutus and those that are left.
+
+     Brutus:  Where, where, Messala, doth his body lie?
+
+     Messala: Lo, yonder, and Titinius mourning it.
+
+     Brutus:  Titinius' face is upward.
+
+     Cato:    He is slain.
+
+Grim mates in a grim day in a grim hour.  Then the cry of Brutus:
+
+              O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
+
+But if he were, perhaps he only gathered old Cassius and Titinius to
+be sure of their company with him and Brutus amongst the gods a
+little later.
+
+     Brutus:  Friends, I owe more tears
+              To this dead man than you shall see me pay.
+              I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.
+
+And, after making arrangements for the removal of Cassius's body, they
+go to try their fortunes in a second fight.  Young Cato is killed and
+good Lucilius taken.  Comes Brutus beaten, with Dardanius his last
+friend, and his three servants, Clitus, Strato, and Volumnius.
+
+     Brutus:  Come, poor remains of friends, rest on this rock.
+
+Strato, exhausted, goes to sleep, as man can sleep during a battle;
+and Brutus whispers the others, one after another, to kill him; but
+they are shocked and refuse: "I'll rather kill myself," "I do such
+a deed?" etc.  He begs Volumnius, his old schoolmate, to hold his
+sword-hilt while he runs on it, for their love of old.
+
+     Volumnius: That's not the office for a friend, my lord.
+
+There are alarums, and they urge him to fly, for it's no use stopping
+there.
+
+     Brutus:  Farewell to you; and you; and you, Volumnius.
+              Strato, thou hast been all this while asleep;
+              Farewell to thee too, Strato! Countrymen,
+              My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
+              I found so man but he was true to me.
+
+Ye gods! but it's grand.  I wish to our God that I could say as
+much--or that man or woman [n]ever found me untrue.  Could Antony say
+as much, afterwards, in Egypt--or Octavius! with Antony then on his
+mind?  Even Antony's last man and servant failed him in the end,
+killing himself rather than kill his master.  But Strato---
+
+There are more alarums and voices calling to them to run.  They urge
+Brutus again, and he tells them to go and he'll follow.  They all run
+except Strato, who hesitates.
+
+     Brutus:  I prithee, Strato, stay thou by thy lord:
+              Thou art a fellow of a good respect;
+              Thy life hath had some snatch of honour in it
+              Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face,
+              While I do run upon it.  Wilt thou, Strato?
+
+     Strato:  Give me your hand first: fare you well, my lord.
+
+     Brutus:  Farewell, good Strato.  Caesar, now be still:
+              I kill'd not thee with half so good a will.
+
+Brutus, good night!
+
+I like Shakespeare's servants.  They seem to show that he sprang from
+servants or common people rather than from lords and masters, for he
+deals with them very gently.  It must be understood that servants,
+bond and free, were born unto the same house and served it for
+generations; and so down to modern England, where the old nurse and
+the tottering old gardener often nursed and played with "Master
+Will," when his father, the dead and gone old squire, was a young
+man.
+
+See where Timon's servants stand in the only patch of sunlight in
+that black and bitter story:
+
+                    Enter Flavius, with two or three SERVANTS.
+
+     1 Serv.: Hear you, master steward, where's our master?
+              Are we undone? cast off? nothing remaining?
+
+     Flav.:   Alack, my fellows, what should I say to you?
+              Let me be recorded by the righteous gods,
+              I am as poor as you.
+
+     1 Serv.: Such a house broke!
+              So noble a master fall'n!  All gone! and not
+              One friend to take his fortune by the arm,
+              And go along with him!
+
+     2 Serv.: As we do turn our backs
+              From our companion thrown into his grave,
+              So his familiars to his buried fortunes
+              Slink all away; leave their false vows with him,
+              Like empty purses pick'd; and his poor self,
+              A dedicated beggar to the air,
+              With his disease of all-shunn'd poverty,
+              Walks, like contempt, alone.  More of our fellows.
+
+                                      Enter other Servants
+
+     Flav.:   All broken implements of a ruin'd house.
+
+     3 Serv.: Yet do our hearts wear Timon's livery;
+              That see I by our faces; we are fellows still,
+              Serving alike in sorrow: leak'd is our bark,
+              And we, poor mates, stand on the dying deck,
+              Hearing the surges threat; we must all part
+              Into this sea of air.
+
+     Flav.:   Good fellows all,
+              The latest of my wealth I'll share amongst you.
+              Wherever we shall meet, for Timon's sake
+              Let's yet be fellows; let's shake our heads, and say,
+              As 'twere a knell unto our master's fortunes,
+              "We have seen better days."  Let each take some.
+                                             (Giving them money.)
+              Nay, put out all your hands.  Not one word more:
+              Thus part we rich in sorrow, parting poor.
+
+
+-----
+
+Notes on Australianisms. Based on my own speech over the years, with
+some checking in the dictionaries.  Not all of these are peculiar to
+Australian slang, but are important in Lawson's stories, and carry
+overtones.
+
+barrackers: people who cheer for a sporting team, etc.
+boko: crazy.
+bushman/bushwoman: someone who lives an isolated existence, far from
+  cities, "in the bush", "outback". (today: "bushy".  In New
+  Zealand it is a timber getter.  Lawson was sacked from a forestry
+  job in New Zealand, "because he wasn't a bushman" :-)
+bushranger: an Australian ``highwayman'', who lived in the `bush'--
+  scrub--and attacked and robbed, especially gold carrying coaches
+  and banks. Romanticised as anti-authoritarian Robin Hood figures--
+  cf. Ned Kelly--but usually very violent.
+  US use was very different (more = explorer), though some
+  lexicographers think the word (along with "bush" in this sense)
+  was borrowed from the US...
+churchyarder: Sounding as if dying--ready for the churchyard = cemetery
+cobber: mate, friend. Used to be derived from Hebrew chaver via
+ Yiddish.  General opinion now seems to be that it entered the
+ language too early for that--and an English etymology is preferred.
+fiver: a five pound (sterling) note (or "bill")
+fossick: pick out gold, in a fairly desultory fashion.  In old
+  "mullock" heaps or crvices in rocks.
+jackaroo: (Jack + kangaroo; sometimes jackeroo)--someone, in early
+  days a new immigrant from England, learning to work on a
+  sheep/cattle station (U.S. "ranch".)
+
+kiddy: young child. "kid" plus ubiquitous Australia "-y" or "-ie"
+nobbler: a drink, esp. of spirits
+overlanding: driving (or, "droving", cattle from pasture to market
+  or railhead.
+pannikin: a metal mug.
+Pipeclay: or Eurunderee, Where Lawson spent much of his early life
+ (including his three years of school...
+Poley: name for s hornless (or dehorned) cow.
+skillion(-room): A "lean-to", a room built up against the back of
+  some other building, with separate roof.
+sliprails: portion of a fence where the rails are lossely fitted
+  so that they may be removed from one side and animal let through.
+smoke-ho: a short break from, esp., heavy physical work, and those who
+  wish to can smoke.
+sov.: sovereign, gold coin worth one pound sterling
+splosh: money
+Sqinny: nickname for someone with a squint.
+Stousher: nickname for someone often in a fight (or "stoush")
+swagman (swaggy):  Generally, anyone who is walking in the "outback"
+  with  a swag. (See "The Romance of the Swag".)  Lawson also
+  restricts it at times to those whom he considers to be tramps,
+  not looking for work but for "handouts" (i.e., "bums" in US.  In view
+  of the Great Depression, 1890->,  perhaps unfairly.  In 1892 it was
+  reckoned 1/3 men were out of work)
+
+GJC
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rising of the Court, by Henry Lawson
+
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