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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75957 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+ Petunia Again
+
+ SKETCHES
+
+ BY
+ S. ELIZABETH JACKSON
+
+ A book is very like a kite, being made of paper and
+ sent out at a venture.
+
+ _G. K. Chesterton._
+
+ ADELAIDE
+ G. HASSELL & SON
+ 1920
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY GRANDFATHER
+
+J.T.C.
+
+
+_The little girl that was me_: “I’ve nothing to read in the train.”
+
+_My grandfather_: “And you won’t need anything. There will be things to
+see and people to listen to.”
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+“At Petunia” was received so kindly that I venture to offer these
+final sketches. The little township on the plains is now for me only a
+happy memory. Unlike their predecessors, most of the present sketches
+and essays have appeared before, either in _Orion_, _The Adelaide
+University Magazine_, _The Red Cross Record_, or _The Woman’s Record_,
+which I have to thank for allowing me to re-publish.
+
+      S.E.J.
+
+      Woodside,
+      10th November, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Petunia Again
+
+                                              Page
+
+ Welcome                                         1
+
+ The Backblocks                                  3
+
+ The Aeroplane                                   5
+
+ From the Chinese                                8
+
+ Adopting Emily                                 10
+
+ Twocott                                        13
+
+ A Country Writer                               14
+
+ The Hypnotist                                  23
+
+ Tin Lizzie                                     24
+
+ The Show                                       26
+
+ The Haircut                                    28
+
+ Scipio                                         29
+
+ Bill Boundy                                    31
+
+ An Angry Man                                   33
+
+ Alcibiades                                     36
+
+ News                                           37
+
+ Amusing Daisy                                  39
+
+ Obiit                                          41
+
+ The Drought                                    41
+
+
+The Works of Simple Simon, LL.D.,
+D.Litt., Ph.D., M.B., B.S.
+
+ An Emendation                                  44
+
+ A Protest                                      46
+
+ A “Lancet” Article                             48
+
+ An Application of Psychology to Medicine       50
+
+ Our National Bulletin                          52
+
+ Nigger                                         60
+
+
+Miscellaneous
+
+ The Queen City of the South                    62
+
+ A Literature in the Making                     68
+
+
+
+
+Petunia Again
+
+
+Welcome
+
+Such a week as we have had in the country! You talk about the stopping
+of the cars giving people a welcome rest in the evenings. Well, we have
+no cars to stop, and only three trains a week, and still we can manage
+eleven social engagements in six days! Three of them were welcomes to
+soldiers. Seventy-eight went away from this district, and every time
+one returns (and that is very often now, thank God!) all the houses
+along the route from the railway station are decorated with flags. I
+expect that sometimes he wonders why people who take the trouble to
+decorate in his honour do not come out to wave. When he gets to the
+Institute he knows, because we are all there waiting to cheer and make
+speeches. Nothing about our boys has been finer than the courtesy with
+which they take our cheers and let us say “Thank you.” It relieves
+us, but oh, how it embarrasses them! They redden, but they smile,
+and are far from looking foolish when they “get up to reply.” The
+speeches aren’t always very easy to reply to, either, because what
+we call courage and duty-doing they think just a matter of course.
+Perhaps nothing more to the point has ever been said to them than this
+spontaneous outburst in one speech:—“By Jo, we are glad to see you.”
+It was worth all the rest about gallantry, and endurance, and honour,
+and so on. We thought all that, too, but just then what was delighting
+us was to see them. We had missed them, and now they were back and
+we would meet them in our daily lives again. And next morning their
+mothers would wake up happy because George and Clem were safe back,
+actually in the house in their own room at that moment!
+
+Well, besides these official (and yet quite informal) welcomes there
+was also a large private party where another soldier, welcomed some
+time before, was to dance and talk with his friends, and there was also
+a Butterfly Fair, because now the war is over we simply must have a
+piano for the Sunday School Kindergarten. And there was the Red Cross
+meeting, and a Home Mission meeting, and the literary society, and
+choir practice, and a Band of Hope concert, and, of course, football on
+Saturday, for most of our players are coming back again now, though
+there are some we shall never see.
+
+
+The Backblocks
+
+Too many town people are prepared to talk as though “the outbacks” were
+anywhere beyond a 20-mile radius of the G.P.O. When you are really in
+the backblocks you turn the washing machine for your hostess, make
+complicated arrangements for keeping the ants out of the sugar, help
+“separate,” cut out some jumpers for the children on the newest town
+pattern, and take your afternoon ride on the poison-cart attending to
+bunny. Once or twice a week you go into the township for the mail. You
+bath frugally because all the water is caught off the roof or in the
+dam, and you empty the tub on to what garden there is, for none can be
+wasted.
+
+I pity all healthy women who never have a chance to go sometimes where
+life, though not easy, is simple and self-contained and wholesome,
+where the work cannot be delegated to the baker or the small goods
+man or the dressmaker just because the weather is hot or you don’t
+feel up to the mark. Without this you cannot feel all the joy of being
+thoroughly essential to your family—nor its occasional terror. Only
+very fine women can live such a life properly, though. You have to
+find your happiness and your amusement in the life itself, not in some
+artificial amusement patched on for the moment. You have to find it in
+permanent and ultimate things, in love and work and effort and hope and
+helpfulness, not in “The Pictures” or a variety show.
+
+I don’t pretend not to enjoy a variety show myself when I’m in town,
+and I don’t pretend that Petunia is in the backblocks, but it is in
+the country, and I am quite sure that country life is as enjoyable as
+a town one, though not every one feels it. Anyone can take a pill, but
+not all can make one, nor even pick out the ingredients from a lot of
+herbs and drugs presented to them.
+
+I suppose that is the trouble with Joyce Wickhams. She has gone to work
+in town so that she can go to the Pav. and Henley Beach on band nights
+as often as she likes. I hope she will miss feeding the swill to the
+grunting, shoving, greedy pigs, miss the leisurely cows, miss the glow
+of health that you feel—without thinking about it—as you canter out for
+them. And Saturday’s tennis is never quite so nice in town as it is in
+the country, where you know everyone on the courts very well, are going
+to sing with most of them at the concert in March, and went with them
+to the working bee at the school last week. We shall miss Joyce. She
+was the best housemaid we’ve ever had in our dialogues, and the most
+popular waitress at tea meetings. Of course she will laugh a great deal
+at Charlie Chaplin, and the town entertainments will be very clever,
+but the fun that is made for you doesn’t make so much of your mind and
+heart laugh as the fun that you help make yourself.
+
+
+The Aeroplane
+
+The excitement continues. We’ve had rain and we’ve seen the aeroplane!
+In fact they came together. On Sunday it was given out in the churches
+that between 10 and 11 on Monday, Capt. Butler would fly over Petunia
+and drop Peace Loan literature. Farmers immediately decided that one
+morning off couldn’t make much difference to a bad season, and mothers
+and daughters exchanged glances in which the washing was postponed.
+When the school mistress had it announced in the Twocott chapel that
+there would be no lessons next morning, the children’s flushed faces
+were as good as cheers. Even the Hobbledehoy, who had seen the great
+sight in town, of course, was not so blasé as he pretended.
+
+On Monday motors and traps and waggons poured into Petunia through
+driving wind and rain. Pedestrians with umbrellas struggled against
+the blast. I don’t quite know what we expected. Perhaps we thought
+the aeroplane would only be visible from the main street, or that it
+would land there, or that the literature would, and in any case, we
+all wanted to take our excitement in company. We lined up for shelter
+in the lee of shops and houses. Opinions differed. Some thought the
+Institute the best site, some the post-office, and some plumped for
+the vicinity of the Recreation Ground, as affording a clear view and a
+suitable place for an airman to descend (or drop out) after a spiral or
+a nose-dive.
+
+The Postmaster suggested that the weather might be too ... but we shut
+him up for a croaker, and poddled about exchanging anticipations and
+chaffing young Jones, who was “look-out” to report the arrival to the
+expectant school. A stockman drifted in with a herd of yearlings, and
+we watched him zig-zag them resignedly past the groups of traps and
+people. Wet ruts gleamed in some fitful sunshine along the straight
+road stretching between green paddocks into the moist distance. There
+came an unexpected sound overhead, and the school children burst along
+the street with decorous hilarity. Something we had seen in pictures
+emerged from the grey and glided overhead, and into the distant grey
+again, “like a spoggy in the sky,” as young Allen poetically observed.
+
+It was in sight for quite four minutes.
+
+Half an hour later we were fairly certain that there were to be no
+nose-dives, no spirals, not even any literature. We snubbed the
+Postmaster, and closed in on the Institute, where the chairman of the
+district tried to focus our attention on the Peace Loan, and make us
+feel we had not come out for nothing. Then laughing people turned their
+collars up round their ears, climbed into buggies, and shook the reins.
+“Gid-dup.”
+
+
+From the Chinese
+
+A few people despise poetry; many more speak respectfully of it only
+because they think they ought to, not because they, personally,
+understand it or even appreciate it. Of course, it is quite easy to
+enjoy a poem without understanding its technique, its rhyme, rhythm,
+and so on, or without being able to say in what, apart from the form,
+it differs from prose. “Can’t you _feel_ it?” is often the sufficient
+answer, in the words of a certain professor of classics.
+
+The following fragment from the Chinese makes us feel that it is
+poetry, though the translator cannot convey to us the poetic form of
+the original.
+
+
+PO CHU-I STARTS ON A JOURNEY EARLY IN THE MORNING.
+
+    Washed by the rain, dust and grime are laid;
+    Skirting the river, the road’s course is flat.
+    The moon has risen on the last remnants of night;
+    The traveller’s speed profits by the early cold.
+    In the great silence I whisper a faint song;
+    In the black darkness are bred sombre thoughts.
+    On the lotus-banks hovers a dewy breeze;
+    Through the rice furrows trickles a singing stream.
+    At the noise of our bells a sleeping dog stirs;
+    At the sight of our torches a roosting bird wakes.
+    Dawn glimmers through the shapes of misty trees....
+    For ten miles, till day at last breaks.
+
+“More than a thousand years have elapsed since that journey,” says the
+_Times_ reviewer, “and nobody knows the words of that ‘faint song,’ or
+the nature of those ‘sombre thoughts,’ but we are just as intimately
+acquainted with Po Chu-I as if he had enlarged by the page on his
+emotional complexities.... Chinese poetry aims to induce a mood rather
+than to state a thought.... Po Chu-I’s sorrows and joys and placid
+reveries hover in the mind after the book is closed, and that—and not
+the number of startling remarks made—is the test of a poem’s value.”
+
+To-day or a thousand years ago, China or Australia, it is all the same.
+You and I have made journeys like that, and can share the poet’s mood.
+We have arisen early and crept about by lantern-light, we have let
+ourselves out on to a road that lies white under a cold moon, and have
+thrilled and hasted in the chill air. The first solemn joy gave place
+to gloom as the heralding darkness enveloped the world. And then we
+felt the dawn-breeze among the gum trees, and heard the creek rustle
+through the water-cress. A dog barked, a bird peeped, and the first
+pink cloud floated in the brightening sky. And then the world woke up,
+the magpies and the farmyards and the pumping engine, and we were glad
+that we were afoot and off, and a little proud about it.
+
+And a thousand years ago an old, old Chinaman sang our mood for us,
+and lo! it was poetry. And because we have felt it all for ourselves,
+though we did not know how to tell about it, what he says plays on our
+minds like music, and we live the mood again.
+
+
+Adopting Emily
+
+“Seen that fine tabby in the woodhouse?” enquired Joshua.
+
+“She’s got a beautiful white chest,” agreed Hob, “and that loose skin
+and soft fur like old M’Glusky.”
+
+“And a pink nose,” said Daisy.
+
+“And her eyes are amber. Do let’s adopt her,” said I.
+
+“Yes, let’s,” chorused the others—all except Marjorie, who prefers
+mousetraps, and says that where one or two cats are gathered together,
+or something, there is always an awful noise. However, we determined to
+have that tabby.
+
+Have you ever tried to adopt a duchess? A duchess in reduced
+circumstances? Then you don’t know what we have been through with
+Emily. (We call her Emily after Miss Fox-Seton, the “large, placid
+creature, kind rather than intelligent,” who became Marchioness in one
+of Mrs. Hodgson Burnett’s books.) Emily is a cat of character. She
+didn’t want to be adopted. She didn’t mind renting our woodheap, but
+preferred not to have to meet the family. She would keep herself to
+herself, thank you. She used to sit, serene and dignified, blinking in
+a sunbeam among the roots, lifting her white bosom and gently kneading
+the ground. If you offered her food she seemed to put up her lorgnettes
+at you, and it wasn’t any good leaving the saucer and going round the
+corner. When you came back Emily was gone, and the food wasn’t.
+
+She certainly impressed us. We built up all sorts of legends around
+her. Her disdain for food and her calm refusal either to accept
+our advances, to withdraw from her place, or to be seen hurrying
+at any time, seemed so very aristocratic. And then how she kept up
+appearances! Marjorie scarcely took the same view as the rest of us,
+especially after Emily so haughtily snubbed the milk she had offered
+herself. She said she didn’t believe she was a duchess at all; more of
+a peroxide barmaid about Emily, if you asked her, a minx with a bust
+who put on airs. And a few nights later she said she wouldn’t have cats
+encouraged about the place. She said she believed Emily was the cause
+of that jazz party on the lawn in the moonlight.
+
+Emily jazz! Never!
+
+“Adopting Emily” became the favourite diversion of our leisure. In the
+end it was very mortifying, very mortifying indeed. We were all sitting
+on our heels round the woodheap coaxing Emily, and Emily as usual
+was barely tolerating our presence, too proud to withdraw, when Mr.
+Wickhams came across the paddocks to borrow another axe.
+
+“Well, I’m blowed!” said he; “so this is where our old cat goes. She’s
+only been home for meals since the wife turned her out of the hat-box.”
+
+Yes, what we took for dignity was sulks, and her aristocratic
+superiority to food was due, to put it bluntly, to a full stomach. Mr.
+Wickhams handsomely forgave us for trying to abduct his best mouser as
+he stretched a long arm into the wood and hauled her off by the scruff
+of the neck. Such an indignity for Emily.
+
+
+Twocott
+
+Driving out to Buxton on Wednesday afternoon, I picked up little Jennie
+Elliott walking home from Twocott.
+
+“Do you go to school already?” I exclaimed.
+
+“Oh, I’ve been going a long time—ever since Christmas. We got a nice
+teacher. She is always good to us—unless she can’t help it; and we are
+always good to her, unless _we_ can’t help it.” Dear understanding
+little mite. “All of us are in the second grade nearly.” “All of us”
+have now learnt to sing, and Jennie is always out early—unless she is
+kept in.
+
+She held on tightly to the side of the dog-cart and looked about the
+country while she prattled out the gossip of the school from the point
+of view of a six-year-old, and I felt a swelling of gratitude to the
+wonderful teacher who keeps eight grades busy and happy and proud of
+themselves, and convinced that she is proud of them, too! “All of us”
+have a very nice time at Twocott, and are learning to be considerate
+and tolerant and self-controlled, as well as the more formal lessons,
+and all taught by a mere woman who understands the art of discipline
+without a stick.
+
+
+A Country Writer
+
+A writer in _The Times Literary Supplement_ complains of the dearth
+of good novels of country life. The modern author, he asserts, claps
+the story on to any county, irrespective of the spirit of the place.
+He takes a tourist’s trip to Cornwall or Yorkshire, and makes a book
+out of it, though his dialogue was never heard on land or sea, flowers
+bloom together whose seasons never met, and his pitiful town thinness
+of mind is visible alike in what he sees and in what he fails to see.
+
+Against these degenerate moderns the letter sets Richard Doddridge
+Blackmore, and regrets that all his novels but one are neglected by an
+undiscriminating or too hasty generation.
+
+Now it is the virtue of country libraries that, though only the
+feeblest of modern novels may find a way there, the best of the old
+linger on their shelves long after they have been ejected from more
+pretentious places. And so, while this letter was still fresh in my
+mind, in our Institute at Petunia, rubbing sides with volumes by Mrs.
+Gaskell and Miss Braddon, I came across “Cripps the Carrier,” whose
+title page proclaimed it to be “by the author of Lorna Doone.” I took
+it home, despite my doubt, as I eyed its yellow pages and heavy print,
+that I should pay with yawns for my virtuosity.
+
+And then on the very first page I met Dobbin, “the best harse as ever
+looked through a bridle.”
+
+“Every ‘talented’ man must think, whenever he walks beside a horse,
+of the superior talents of the horse ... the power of blowing (which
+no man hath in a comely and decorous form); and last, not least, the
+final blessing of terminating decorously in a tail.... Scarcely any man
+stops to think of the many cares that weigh upon the back of an honest
+horse. Dobbin knew all this, but was too much of a horse to dwell
+on it. He kept his tongue well under his bit, his eyes in sagacious
+blinkers, and sturdily up the hill he stepped, while Cripps, his
+master, trudged beside him.”
+
+At the second page I was smiling outright, and knew that not a word of
+this book would I knowingly skip.
+
+Such is the quality of the writing that not only do we learn to know
+Zacchary Cripps and his brother Tickus (christened after the third
+book of the “Pentachook,” as they called his sixth brother), his horse
+Dobbin, and Mary Hookham, “as he was a tarnin’ over in his mind,”
+together with Squire Oglander, Lawyer—or “Liar”—Sharp, as Zac addressed
+him, “wishing to put all things legal,” Miranda his wife, and Kit his
+son, as well as or better than we know our neighbours, but we are all
+the time falling in love with that sly rogue, that mellow scholar, that
+lover of a horse and a pretty girl, Richard Doddridge Blackmore. Here
+is a man who knows and loves and smiles over the rustic mind and life,
+as he knows and loves the trees, the hedges, the ruts, the sunlight,
+and the frosts, and all the ways of Nature. He is leisurely, and you
+must be leisurely with him. You must stop to see what he sees, and
+accompany all his friends on their goings out and comings in, smiling
+and enjoying with him. He cares more for the telling than for the
+story; he knows, like Louis Stevenson, that “to travel hopefully is
+better than to arrive.”
+
+Oxford and Oxfordshire are the scenes of the story, and we hear more
+of town than gown, and more of Beckley than either. If the precise
+critic ask whether it be a novel of character or of place or of plot,
+the precise critic is a fool. There is the country, with its lanes and
+hedges and changing seasons, and there are the people who carried and
+delved and gossiped and wondered, sympathized with the trials of their
+“betters,” and did their duty by parish church and parish “public,”
+“same as Christians ought to.” And if you put it squarely to Squire (or
+Parson?) Blackmore: “Come, now, you don’t expect me to believe that
+Lawyer Sharp actually ... eh?” he will vouchsafe such a Philistine not
+so much as a wink in reply, though you may catch a quizzical twinkle at
+a generation too bald-minded to enjoy a hop field because the blossom
+must be held up on poles.
+
+Blackmore, like Shakespeare, knows every turn of the bucolic’s slow,
+sturdy, tortuous mind; he loved his pauses, the dawning of perception,
+his easy missing of the point, his superstitions, and his common sense.
+Read this (it comes in that passage where the escaping Grace Oglander
+appeals to the Carrier to shelter her from pursuit in his van):
+
+“But missy, poor missy,” Cripps stammered out, drawing on his heart for
+every word, “you was buried on the seventh day of January, in the year
+of our Lord 1838; three pickaxes was broken over digging your grave
+by reason of the frosty weather, and all of us come to your funeral!
+Do ’ee go back, miss, that’s a dear! The churchyard to Beckley is a
+comfortable place, and this here wood no place for a Christian.”
+
+And he can paint the brisk homely maids as well as the gaping
+tongue-tied men.
+
+“Now, sir, if you please. You must—you must,” cried Mary Hookham, his
+best maid, trotting in with her thumbs turned back from a right hot
+dish, and her lips up as if she were longing to kiss him, to let out
+her feelings.... “Sir, if you please, you must ate a bit.... ‘Take
+on,’ as my mother has often said, ‘take on as you must, if your heart
+is right, when the hand of the Lord is upon you; but never take off
+with your victuals.’... All of us has our own troubles,” said Mary,
+“but these here pickles is wonderful.”
+
+In the affectionate malice of the misadventures into which is plunged
+Hardenow, that earnest, scholarly Tractarian, there is all the fun of
+a man who is teasing a beloved and misguided friend. The muscles he is
+so proud of shall be laughed at, into brambles he shall plunge, and
+lose his hat and tear his neckcloth into ribbons; in a pig-net shall
+he be caught, and his athletic legs having struck terror into the mind
+of Rabbit John, bound with thongs shall he be, and left in an empty
+pig-stye, the very parlour of pig-styes (“on the floor, where he had
+the best of it, for odour ever rises”), there to continue his fast for
+many hours. Pity him not overmuch; “his accustomed stomach but thinks
+it Friday come again!”
+
+Aye, Blackmore knew man, and maid, and beast—even pig. Lying in this
+plight, Hardenow sees:
+
+“... a loose board, lifted every now and then by the unringed snout
+of a very good old sow. Pure curiosity was her motive, and no evil
+appetite, as her eyes might tell. She had never seen a fellow and a
+tutor of a college rolling, as she herself longed to do; and yet in
+a comparatively clumsy way. She grunted deep disapprovement of his
+movements, and was vexed that her instructions were so entirely thrown
+away.”
+
+Here is a picture of a little child, seen through his hole by the
+distracted tutor:
+
+“A little child toddled to the wicket gate and laid fat arms against
+it, and laboured, with impatient grunts, to push it open.... He gazed
+with his whole might at this little peg of a body, in the distance
+toppling forward, and throwing out behind the whole weight of its great
+efforts.... This little peg, now in battle with the gate, was a solid
+Peg in earnest; a fine little Cripps, about five years old, as firm as
+if just turned out of a churn. She was backward in speech, as all the
+little Crippses are; and she rather stared forth her ideas than spoke
+them. But still, let her once get a settlement concerning a thing that
+must be done to carry out her own ideas, and in her face it might be
+seen, once for all, that stop she never would till her own self had
+done it....
+
+“Taught by adversity (the gate had banged her chubby knees, etc.)
+she did thus: Against the gatepost she settled her most substantial
+availability, and exerted it, and spared not. Therewith she raised one
+solid leg, and spread the naked foot thereof, while her lips were firm
+as any toe of all the lot, against the vile thing that had knocked
+her about, and the power that was contradicting her. Nothing could
+withstand this fixed resolution of one of the far more resolute moiety
+of humanity. With a creak of surrender the gate gave back; and out came
+little Peggy Cripps, with a broad face glowing with triumph.”
+
+I have told you of Dobbin; I suppose I mustn’t detain you to hear
+about Lawyer Sharp’s horse? “A better disposed horse was never
+foaled; and possibly none—setting Dobbin aside, as the premier and
+quite unapproachable type—who took a clearer view of his duties to
+the provider of corn, hay, and straw, and was more ready to face and
+undergo all proper responsibilities.... He cannot fairly be blamed,
+and not a pound should be deducted from his warrantable value, simply
+because he did what any other young horse in the world would have
+thought to be right. He stared all round to ask what was coming next,
+he tugged on the bridle, with his fore feet out, as a leverage against
+injustice, and his hind legs spread wide apart, like a merry thought,
+ready to hop anywhere.” Later he made for Oxford, “where he thought of
+his oat sieve smelling sweetly, and nice little nibbles at his clover
+hay, and the comfortable soothing of his creased places by a man who
+would sing a tune to him.”
+
+One of the charms of the book is that it will make you a nuisance to
+your family; there are so many pictures that you simply must read them,
+so many phrases they must taste with you, and everything that you
+do quote seems to be capped and improved upon by something a little
+further on, and you simply must venture it.
+
+Not a thing does he miss, from ruts (oh, that pæan on ruts! “Everything
+here was favourable to the very finest growth of ruts. The road had
+once been made, which is a necessary condition of any masterpiece of
+rut work; it had then been left to maintain itself, which encourages
+wholesome development....”) to the effects of a hard frost, the borings
+of the Sirex Gigas, and the tufted undergrad. who tools the “Flying
+Dutchman” up the streets of Oxford. And nothing would we have him miss.
+
+
+How can I let my dear friend Richard Blackmore, with his chuckling
+gossip about Worth Oglander and Grace, Cripps, and the rustics of
+Oxford and Beckley, fade out of memory on Petunia shelves?
+
+
+The Hypnotist
+
+The Round of Gaiety continues. We have just lived through a Sunday
+School anniversary (with tea meeting), a visit from _the_ hypnotist,
+and the Show.
+
+The Hobbledehoy (latterly known as Hob) wrote that his father must go
+to the hypnotic entertainment. He had been with some of the boys from
+College, and the sight of a respectable schoolmaster under the delusion
+that he was assisting at a dogfight left him without words to express
+his joy. On hearing that our new man, Fat Bill Boundy, who has the face
+of a natural comedian, meant to submit himself for experiment, Joshua
+decided that a little amusement would cheer Marjorie up, and of course
+he accompanied her.
+
+Admission turned out to be 2s. 4d. and 3s. 6d.
+
+“But the advertisement said ‘Popular Prices,’” protested Joshua.
+
+“That’s right,” agreed the ticket man, smoothly, “popular with the
+entertainer.”
+
+Joshua says that this was the only joke of the evening. Bill Boundy
+went up on to the platform all right, but the Great Man only made him
+twiddle his fingers and roll his eyes. He said that on this occasion
+he was “mesmerizing but not hypnotizing.” Joshua sat up half the night
+with Jack’s Reference Book and the Encyclopædia Britannica, trying to
+find out the difference. It appears that it consists in the size of the
+town in which the performance is given.
+
+
+Tin Lizzie
+
+Our minister bought a “Tin Lizzie”—at least, I’m afraid he passed it
+off with the old, old joke, “We’ll have a Ford now, and a motor after
+the war.” But Tin Lizzie worked harder than any horse, and our minister
+was well satisfied—except when he forgot to water her, or crank her, or
+in some way misunderstood her internal organs; and then he called her
+“The Pesky Thing,” and even went so far as to say—I mean, of course, to
+_think_—“Dash it.”
+
+But a time came when the Pesky Thing had to be cleaned, and
+oiled, and crawled over, and squirmed under, and taken to pieces,
+and—and—sermonized over. And our minister was a persevering man, and
+so were his friends; and they talked and thought and read motors, and
+captured the local mechanic and a passing amateur and an expert; and
+finally they got her to go—a little way. Wherefore on Saturday night
+the minister went to bed happy.
+
+But all the same he had a dream, a nightmare, a hair-raising,
+heart-stopping nightmare. He dreamed that he was _walking_ to church
+when he noticed his boots—and they were his motor-cleaning boots,
+scraped on the heels and worn at the toes and cracked all over. But he
+was not dismayed; the pulpit would hide them.
+
+And yet a little way, and lo, he had on his head the cap, the
+greasy, poacher’s cap that protected his clerical hairs from the
+motor-drippings.
+
+“But I can pocket my cap,” this imperturbable man comforted himself.
+
+And yet a little further, and it was his coat, his shapeless, sagging,
+grimy motor-coat.... And now he really was put out, for, as he foresaw,
+
+“I shall have on those trousers in a few minutes!”
+
+And when at last he got to church the sense of doom was upon him, and
+when he gave out the hymn the organ was out of order.
+
+And they took it to pieces, and cleaned it, and oiled it, and climbed
+over it and crawled under it....
+
+“Now I see that all things work together for good,” dreamed our
+minister (he was ever an optimist), “_for I’ve got the right togs on
+for the job_.”
+
+
+The Show
+
+During the strike our railway supported only three trains a week; for
+the Show it surpassed itself and ran three on one day, or, rather, two
+and a dog-box. But they were all full, and I do think the crowd enjoyed
+itself, or at any rate Marjorie’s prize cake and cream puffs, which
+were carried off surreptitiously. Joshua says that the judging was
+very unsatisfactory. His two-tooth did not get a prize. Marjorie, on
+the other hand, considers that in the cooking and dairy sections the
+most exemplary fairness was shown.
+
+In the general excitement of meeting Pete Wigglesby, whom we haven’t
+seen for years, Joshua gave his order for a milking machine, although
+the drought has set in again. Marjorie wishes he would want to show off
+to some other old friend, and order a new house. “One without cement
+floors, and with no step down into the kitchen,” she says, plaintively.
+“And with a bathroom,” puts in Hob.
+
+Peterborough Show comes next, and I fancy our men will mob it. For one
+thing, it is such a good opportunity to get their hair cut. You see, we
+are short of barbers in Petunia, and any excursions are eagerly seized.
+When the District Schools Picnic was held at Glenelg there were queues
+outside the hairdressers there till late in the afternoon, and it was
+considered that the managers of our fair made a great _coup_ when they
+ran a saloon as a sideshow. By the end of the evening Dicky Conlon
+was getting to be quite an expert hair-cutter. There was a little
+disturbance when Joe Wickhams saw himself in the glass, but Constable
+Merritt knocked the razor out of his hand and pulled him off Dicky.
+After that it was all right, because some one had the presence of mind
+to take away the mirror.
+
+
+The Haircut
+
+Joshua couldn’t go to Peterborough Show after all, and his hair was
+awful. Marjorie “could not foresee to what lengths it would go,” and
+advised him to wear it in curling-pins. Joshua begged her to try what
+she could do with a basin, and finally persuaded her to take a comb and
+scissors and “put the reaper into the crop.” Of course, the machine had
+to go over it several times, but at last only the stubble remained. She
+had some difficulty in getting the furrows on one side to meet those on
+the other, but finally the terrace effect was complete. Windy corner,
+where the roads meet on top, was a difficult point to negotiate, and
+Vimy Ridge took some levelling. The razor-work was particularly fine,
+and Joshua deserves the V.C. Marjorie was rather dashed by her failure
+to sell him a bottle of hair-restorer; she urged that it might help
+check the growth.
+
+
+Scipio
+
+Daisy is still after a pet whose usefulness she can justify as a
+potential mouse-catcher, but our disappointment with the Duchess has
+made us humbler and more discreet. This time we asked a neighbour for
+the gift of his apparently superfluous black kitten.
+
+“’Taint mine,” said he; “it belongs to my old Nosey. She had it in the
+haystack, and I have never been able to catch it to drown it. If you
+can get it you can have it.”
+
+“We shan’t find any difficulty with Scipio,” exulted the Hobbledehoy,
+home for “month out,” “because no one has been feeding him.”
+
+“Scipio?” I asked.
+
+“The black kitten,” he explained. “What they used to call the little
+niggers. Good name for a gutter-snipe.”
+
+Well, we certainly have no difficulty in getting Scipio into the
+neighbourhood of nourishment. He (and Nosey his mother, and Miss
+Perkins his aunt, and the Yellow Peril from up the road) will scud
+across two paddocks at the sound of our call. At twenty paces, however,
+Scipio becomes coy. He rubs himself ingratiatingly against his mother,
+he sniffs towards the food, but won’t be wheedled. He may daringly
+sneak up within six feet to snatch a piece of meat, but he runs off
+again growling and sticks a paw on it, and turns his eyes towards us,
+flattening his ears while he eats. By the exercise of great patience
+and by throwing bits of meat at lessening distances he has even learned
+to snatch the meat from Daisy’s hand, to eat it without moving far,
+to—no, not to be stroked! At the first touch on his fur he darts to
+the gate, brings up, turns round, a little ashamed of his fright as
+he hears Daisy’s cooing voice—or, perhaps, still a little hungry!—and
+stands ready for flight, his tail gallantly up, though, and twitching
+his muscles confidingly, so that the fur ripples up and down his back
+in the sunlight. He fixes us with his blue eyes, that are already
+turning green at the edges, starts forward, checks—and that is as far
+as we can get with the adopting of Scipio. Poor little gutter-snipe!
+We shall never tame him. He can’t believe in human kindness. The only
+love he trusts is the warm touch of his mother, and she will cast him
+off soon, and his kittenhood will be over. Scipio will live as he can
+on pickings from rubbish heaps and mice in the haystacks and birds in
+the hedge. But it is Daisy who will be unhappy about it, not Scipio!
+Luckily, cats are not introspective.
+
+
+Bill Boundy
+
+Have I told you about our Bill Boundy? I have a rooted conviction that
+for a good many people music is simply a noise that they hope will soon
+stop. The reason why people will hardly ever confess to being unmusical
+is probably Shakespeare’s unfortunate remark:
+
+    “The man that hath no music in himself,
+    Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
+    Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”
+
+To me it seems very hard that people should be under a cloud simply
+because of some defect in their organs of Corti, or some other part of
+the physical apparatus for hearing the exquisiteness of tune in sound.
+However, Bill Boundy is undoubtedly musical. He could lean against the
+wall all day listening to Hob practising. “It makes the skin of my head
+run tight,” he says, ecstatically and in apology, when Joshua motions
+him stablewards.
+
+Bill is a treasure. I hope Joshua will never sack him irrevocably. He
+had “a week home to Munta” for Christmas, and is simply bursting with
+conversation. Most of his anecdotes turn upon his mother, a salty old
+Cornishwoman. She is a pensioner, but quite properly expects as much
+courtesy from the officials as if she were any other member of the
+public.
+
+“I be waiting, my son,” was her gentle reminder through the post office
+window to the negligent back of “some young Jack-a-napes.” The new
+clerk took no notice.
+
+“Didn’t ’ee hear, son? I be standing.”
+
+“No son of yours,” snapped the sensitive youth.
+
+“Must be somebody’s son,” urged the old lady, calmly, “unless ’ee come
+out of incubator.”
+
+Jack-in-Office is now quite briskly attentive to Bill Boundy’s mother.
+
+Bill is filled with admiration and a little malice because John Thomas
+Trellagan’s boy has just qualified as a doctor.
+
+“Fair set up about it, John Tummas be. ‘Rayther young, John,’ says I.
+‘Shouldn’t like him monkeying with my innards, ’a believe.’ ‘Aw,’ says
+John Tummas, a terrible obliging man, ‘they only practise on quite
+young children at first, ’a believe.’”
+
+Joshua says Bill is “an ingratiating beggar.” Relations were strained
+because Bill hadn’t got the milking machine clean in time, but while
+they speeded up Bill wheedled Joshua into a good temper. He told him
+another story of John Tummas Trellagan’s boy. He has had his first
+maternity case. The mother and child are in a bad way, says Bill, but
+Clarence still hopes to save the father.
+
+Bill always knows all that goes on in the township. Now that paper and
+string cost so much those who forget to take a cloth for their bread
+have to pay a halfpenny extra. Bill was there when the butcher took
+his revenge by charging the baker’s little messenger for the paper he
+wrapped the dog’s meat in. Thank goodness, everyone in Petunia can take
+a joke.
+
+
+An Angry Man
+
+I had chosen “Mary Barton” because Mrs. Gaskell wrote it, and “Joan
+and Peter” because no blue stocking with a care for her reputation
+can afford to admit ignorance of whatever book happens to be Wells’s
+penultimate, (or at any rate ante-penultimate), and I felt that I
+deserved some champagne after this solid-looking fare. I looked round
+the shelves gloomily, despairing of finding anything frivolous
+in the scanty stock from which in Petunia we draw for our week’s
+entertainment. “Pickwick Papers”—delightful, but too old a friend.
+“Three Men in a Boat”—also past its first youth. “Galahad Jones”—the
+very best of its kind, but then we only returned it last week.
+“Fatima”—um-m. Well, it had the plain cover of a self-respecting
+publisher; good print, plenty of conversation, titled folk, a yacht. It
+sounded frivolous enough. I took it.
+
+I do not regret my choice, though my pleasure was scarcely due to
+the writer. There is no need to tell you the story. It was about a
+French-Arabian young lady dressed in a burnous (yes!) and coins, who
+married a tuberculous Scotch peer, and fell out with a deep-dyed
+villain (also of the peerage), and loved a doctor, the Bayard of his
+profession and the saintliest scientist who ever fell into the devilish
+hands of Arabian bandits agitating (apparently) for the eight hour day,
+only to be rescued by the lady in the burnous. No, the fun was not in
+the story, entertaining as its author’s luxurious enjoyment of herself
+undoubtedly was; the fun was entirely due to reading in the wake of an
+angry man with a pencil, who took the whole thing seriously.
+
+He began on the first page. “A baronet would not be called ‘Lord,’”
+he reproves mildly. You could see his feeling; purely irritation with
+the printers. But as the story progressed it became clear that it was
+not the compositor who was at fault. “The authoress evidently does not
+understand titles,” he snarls. “Earl Harben would not be referred to as
+‘Lord Eric.’” He slashes his pencil through “the Lady Eric,” and bang
+goes “her grace.” Fury nearly obliterates the “gh” in “straightened
+circumstances.” Next he reasons with the misguided person who has been
+adjudged worthy of the dignity of print (my own idea is that a doting
+husband paid for the whole thing himself). “Not a burgomaster _and_
+a maire,” he pleads; “not in the same town. One is German, the other
+French.” Other anomalies he passes with a mere flick of the pencil,
+an exasperated sniff, as it were. I stuck to the yarn solely for the
+pleasure of savouring his hot fury, his cold despair, his pleading, his
+rage.
+
+“The Presbyterians”—the infuriated man nearly dug through the page—“do
+not pray for the dead.”
+
+And then came the (for me) sad page whereafter comment ceased. He had
+pounced on an exotic phrase.
+
+“Pure Yankee!” he exclaims, triumphantly, and all is forgiven. I parted
+from him with sorrow.
+
+His conclusion was wrong, of course, as I could prove if I met him. No
+one ought to accuse an American woman of not understanding the British
+peerage!
+
+
+Alcibiades
+
+The pet problem is solved! A chum has presented Hob with a small black
+pup, and, as Hob found to his disgust that even Prefects can’t keep
+dogs at school, he brought him home at the Michaelmas holidays.
+
+“What is his name?” demanded Daisy.
+
+“The Dam Dog,” replied Hob.
+
+“What!” ejaculated Marjorie.
+
+“The Dam Dog. Oh, it’s all right, mother. It means ‘dog that washes in
+a dam.’ D.A.M., you know.”
+
+“Thank you, Hob. I know you go to college, but I can spell ‘dam’
+myself—both ways. You must find some other name for your dog.”
+
+The little fellow kept us all awake the night Hob left, and Joshua
+remarked in the morning that he thought Marjorie might now be more
+willing to let the name stand. However, Hob wrote to say that he had
+decided upon Alcibiades.
+
+This time it was Joshua who put his foot down. He said that, if ever
+the time should come (which he doubted) when the dog was useful
+with sheep he was not going to make a fool of himself by shouting
+“Alcibiades.”
+
+So now “his name is Alcibiades,” as Daisy explains, “but we call him
+Peter.”
+
+Peter is a lovable little chap. He barks, prances, pounces, worries,
+with all the energy possible to a little barrel-shaped body that
+has only just ceased to wobble when it walks. Yesterday the
+police-constable called with news of our missing cow. Peter took the
+opportunity to bite his trousers and pull his boot laces, and then
+rolled over and over in an ecstacy of self-importance.
+
+
+News
+
+Don’t apologize for sending “no news, only views, blended with a cold
+in the head.” I never can see why letters should be newsy.
+
+“There is nothing to write about; I am not doing anything,” people say.
+But if they are not doing they are thinking, and our thoughts are often
+more interesting to our friends than events, which very likely have
+little connection with ourselves at all. I’ve an idea that the best
+correspondents, like the best essay writers, are the egoists.
+
+I am not one of the best letter-writers, however. In fact, I feel
+distinctly newsy. There is always something going on in Petunia. For
+instance, some more of our boys have returned from the war. We were
+pleased! A turkey was dressed in honour of one, and then the date of
+arrival was several times postponed. The problem of problems is—how
+long will a turkey keep even in (home-made) cold storage this weather?
+Any little unusual smell was greeted anxiously with, “I hope that isn’t
+the turkey!”
+
+Twocott gave a strawberry fête and magic lantern in honour of its
+soldiers, only the strawberries didn’t come, and the lantern was
+missing. Still, the evening was a great success; there was so much more
+time to talk and play.
+
+But the policeman’s wife has had the most excitement. Her husband was
+away, and she was awakened by strange noises. At first she thought
+it was smothered laughter, and then she thought it was curses (not
+smothered); presently there was a crash and a groan. In the shadow of
+the lane opposite a writhing mass of men bore something stealthily
+into the darkness. Our policeman’s wife is a heroine. She resolved not
+to desert the children, and buried her head in the bedclothes. In the
+morning Mrs. Odgers, coming over to borrow some dripping, was full of
+the kindness of the men who had moved the piano into her new house on
+their way home from the political meeting at Buxton.
+
+
+Amusing Daisy
+
+I do wish all girls took a course of home nursing. I’ve been nursing
+Daisy with one hand and reading up the subject with the other, so to
+speak. I can now sponge the patient with almost no exertion to her and
+without letting her get cold, at least, not very; and I can change the
+sheets without moving her from the bed. When Daisy gets better perhaps
+Marjorie or Joshua will give me a turn, just so that I can perfect my
+art. Daisy liked the cap I wore to protect my hair; it decided her
+to be a nurse herself some day. But the best subject for amusing the
+restless little soul was Peter—well, then, Alcibiades. I told Joshua
+about the beautiful echo that would reverberate “over the downs” if he
+called “Alcibiades,” but he said life was too short for elocutionary
+exercises while you round up sheep. “You mean your temper is too
+short,” observed Marjorie very justly.
+
+Of course, I couldn’t have Peter in the room catching scarlatina and
+spreading infection, but Daisy was never tired of hearing about him. We
+country people don’t keep our animals in the Zoo and visit them once a
+year. They are part of our life, and we talk about them accordingly.
+Dobbin, now—but I suppose I mustn’t? Well, well, to return to Peter.
+Sometimes he would stand on a bench under the window and put his paws
+on the sill, eagerly looking in with his bright black eyes, his ears
+pricked, his ecstatic tail hopefully suggesting a walk. And then bones.
+He loves bones, nice old gamey ones, disinterred with excitement and
+later buried again with earnest care. The ambition of his heart is
+to gnaw them inside. He prances in proudly, tail up, head up, bone
+on one side, and then at the reprimand, the transparent bubble of
+his innocence pricked, he turns round (laughing, doubtless, at his
+discomfiture), and makes for his mat—when he doesn’t defy you from
+under the table. And to see him tugging at an apron-string, legs set,
+eyes bulging!
+
+“What else does he do?” enquires Daisy solemnly. I can’t think of
+anything else, and I say lamely:
+
+“Well, once he barked at a beetle.”
+
+
+Obiit
+
+Peter is dead.
+
+Daisy is inconsolable. He was such an engaging little fellow.
+
+He was the only dog that Marjorie ever allowed inside.
+
+He is buried under the apple tree where he used to forage so busily for
+bones.
+
+
+The Drought
+
+Last birthday Hob got a rather special penknife. This disposed him to
+be generous with his third and oldest.
+
+“If I give you this,” he meditated to little Allen from next door, “I
+suppose you will cut yourself with it?”
+
+“I wouldn’t,” protested Allen. Hob gave it to him. Last week when Daisy
+and I were going to the library Allen came prancing up to us.
+
+“I’ve got a cut finger,” he exclaimed, triumphantly. Then, suddenly
+remembering, “But I didn’t do it with Hob’s knife.” He danced backward
+on his toes so as to face us as we walked on.
+
+“I’ve been to town,” offered Daisy.
+
+“See the aererplane? See the Cave? See Father Christmas?” he demanded.
+
+“Yes,” bragged Daisy.
+
+“I ain’t,” said Allen, wistfully.
+
+And the harvest is so scanty that Father Christmas will have to be
+very frugal if he is to come at all to the homes of some working men.
+Petunia looks very sad, bare and brown and dusty. The sparrows hop
+about with parched open beaks, waiting their turn when the tap drips,
+and on Sundays the dejected draught horses stand about in the trampled
+dust while the hot wind soughs through the stunted shrubs, and the sun
+blazes on bare paddocks, and shimmers on the iron roofs. In winter it
+is different. The light shines clearly on gay green crops and whitens
+the curving blades, and the horses mosey companionably along the
+roadsides, nibbling the grass, twitching humorous nostrils, gambolling
+clumsily and shaking their bell-bottomed pasterns, screaming with
+laughter when sportively bitten by a friend. Oh, man and beast love
+Petunia in winter! But droughts really ought not to be allowed. It is
+moving to think of ill-fed cattle and disheartened workers.
+
+    “Then welcome each rebuff
+    That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
+    Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go,”
+
+writes Browning. In the good seasons I find this advice inspiring. When
+the rebuff begins it seems less so. And when one thinks of the returned
+soldiers who are only getting three bushels to the acre (not even
+enough for seed!) one remembers with tears that it is easier to die for
+a country than to live for it. “Beginning again” after the years at
+the war takes resolution and courage, the willingness to take risks,
+and the patience not to take them hastily, that are as true tests of
+manhood as any they had abroad.
+
+
+
+
+The Works of Simple Simon, LL.D., D.Litt., Ph.D., M.B., B.S.
+
+
+An Emendation
+
+Amid the welter of possible misprints in such writers as Shakespeare,
+Shelley, and Coleridge, one obvious correction would appear to have
+been overlooked.
+
+    “Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?
+    I’ve been to London to look at the Queen.
+    Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?
+    I frightened a little mouse under her chair.”
+
+So runs one of the earliest-known (to me) and best-loved poems.
+
+But is it credible that the romantic young cat who trimmed his fur and
+hoisted his tail and fared forth to catch a glimpse of Majesty would
+create a vulgar scene in that adored presence? Is it credible that,
+returning, he should boast of his boorishness, like a gutter-snipe
+making a _pied de nez_? Nor can I think that what he saw at Court
+turned our gallant to a cynic, coarsely sniggering out his disillusion.
+No, I prefer to believe that a pedantic regard for mechanical accuracy
+of metre has caused the printer to err. For “frightened” I believe we
+should read “caught.”
+
+    “I _caught_ a little mouse under her chair.”
+
+The astonishing thing is that no previous editor seems to have thought
+of this. Of course, there will be some dissenters.
+
+“What!” will exclaim the upholder of things as they are, instead of as
+they might so much better be, “Would you have us sentimentalize the
+cat, and by pathetic fallacy pretend that the young prig thought to
+‘serve his Queen’?”
+
+“Not at all,” I reply. I will tell you my idea. Having stepped softly
+and daintily into the presence and slipped behind the tapestry and out
+again near the throne, he gazed adoringly at the lovely Queen, at her
+soft hair under the crown, at her rosy fingers, her silk-clad knee, the
+graceful brocaded train with which his pussy-humour longed to play. And
+then his eyes, big and black with the unaccustomed splendour, suddenly
+espied the natural, homely mouse licking his whiskers impudently in
+the fancied security of the royal throne. Pussycat was shocked and
+interested (like a little boy with a dog in church), and he watched
+and watched till he was all pussy, till the Court faded and Pussycat’s
+strategic eye made him pounce before he thought.
+
+And when the Ladies-in-Waiting fainted because they dared not scream,
+and the Gentlemen-in-Waiting dashed forward because they thought
+Pussycat might scrunch the mouse under the royal chair, Pussycat laid
+back his ears and darted his eyes defensively, and with a laughing
+growl laid it at the Queen’s own feet.
+
+And so when, safe back at home over a saucer of milk, Pussycat told a
+reproachful little boy where he had been, and the little boy screamed
+with delight,
+
+    “Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?”
+
+Pussycat, hugging himself for his naughty boldness, and smiling to
+think how the Queen had smiled, and vastly enjoying the sensation he
+was making, burst out with his answer (and that is the meaning of the
+irregular metre, the long pause and stress):
+
+    “I _caught_ a little mouse under her chair!”
+
+
+A Protest
+
+I have long regretted the publicity accorded to the pieman
+incident—solely on the pieman’s account.
+
+    “Simple Simon met a pieman,
+    Going to the fair.”
+
+Our family has always been noted for its straightforward simplicity. I
+was hungry, I was curious in pie-lore, and I made the request which I
+conceive any youth, bred to gracious treatment, would have made.
+
+    “Said Simple Simon to the pieman,
+    Let me taste your ware.”
+
+So might the Prince of Wales himself have spoken. O, sordid, oh
+mercenary pieman! Where was thy pride of bakery, where thy manners?
+Thou did’st neither feed the hungry nor wait with honest pride a meed
+of praise. Thine not the artist soul, thine not the joy of giving;
+thine, alas! but lust of pelf. What does the paltry fellow reply?
+
+    “Said the pieman to Simple Simon,
+      Show me first your penny.”
+
+With sorrow and scorn I gave answer candidly:
+
+    “Said Simple Simon to the pieman,
+      For sure I haven’t any.”
+
+My simple dignity speaks for itself. A more sophisticated youth would
+have demanded the production of the hawker’s licence.
+
+
+A “Lancet” Article
+
+A subject on which I have several times reflected is tuberculosis, and
+I believe that I can cure it. An account of my method and of how I hit
+upon it will doubtless gratify my readers.
+
+I have always held that Nature’s avenue of healing is the lips. In my
+youth I studied physics, and passed the Senior—or was it the Junior?
+Anyway, the idea came to me of disintegrating the molecules of which
+the bacillus or germ is composed. To be precise, I meant to grab the
+nitrogen out of them. Unfortunately, I recollected that there is
+nitrogen in the tissues as well, and I did not feel certain that I
+could disintegrate one without the other.
+
+My present device is strictly scientific. Beginning with the principle
+that cure is to be through the lips, and that the goal is to be the
+elimination of the bacilli, I asked myself how they could be extracted.
+Not with forceps, that was clear. Then, in the course of my extensive
+reading I was much struck in “The English at the North Pole,” with
+the adhesion of nails, knives, and other steel and iron ware to the
+magnetic pole. “What,” thought I to myself, “if I were to magnetize
+the bacilli?” Of course, the tubercle bacilli contain no iron, but
+iron can be taken through the lips, and some of it would roost on the
+germs in passing. I followed this procedure, and then, having opened
+the patient’s mouth to its fullest extent, dangled a magnet down the
+throat. On withdrawing the instrument it was found that 149,563,769
+tubercles, or more than can dance on the point of a needle, adhered
+to it. No other treatment is necessary, though the operation needs to
+be performed daily (at a fee of £10 10s. per time) for twelve months.
+The operator should wear a mask, and should boil his face and hands
+thoroughly after each operation.
+
+At the end of this time the patient will be in a very different
+condition from what he was before.
+
+I tried this treatment on T.B. He was 96 years old, with a previous
+history of fractured skull and varicose veins. The epidermis of his
+nose was found to be a good deal reddened. I administered three ounces
+of iron, and applied the magnet. The operation was entirely successful.
+There is no prognosis, because the patient choked. Through what?
+_Through the flocking of the germs to the magnet._ This proves that
+the dose of iron was too strong. Care must be taken to prevent the
+magnetization of too many bacilli at the same operation.
+
+I confidently look forward to receiving large sums for this treatment,
+especially if well-advertised in gullible quarters.
+
+
+An Application of Psychology to Medicine
+
+The insistent demands of Psychology (too long regarded with jealousy)
+to be called in to the aid of Medicine have at length been recognized.
+_In corpore sano_ is an easy matter compared with _mens sana_. The
+medical man soon learns to prescribe his nostrums, and to draw up a
+diet which shall suit the palate of his patient; the very skilled can
+even hit upon the exact vintage which shall be most acceptable. The
+mentality is also diagnosed with as much insight as can be expected;
+but now the treatment is less easy to decide. The book-list proves
+harder than the wine-list, for here the doctor is on less familiar
+ground. It is at this point that the psychologist’s work is of value.
+Disciples of Æsculapius will be glad to receive the following typical
+book-list communicated to us by a rising young physician of South
+Australia (a remote province of our Empire in the outlying parts of the
+Southern Hemisphere) who has used it with success.
+
+First week of treatment.—Letting the mind down gently. Works by Ethel
+Dell, Gertrude Page.
+
+Second week.—Mind to be lulled. “Just David,” “Pollyanna.” (In very
+obstinate cases, _e.g._, returned soldiers, “Jessica’s First Prayer”
+and “Eric, or Little by Little” may be added.)
+
+Third week.—Stage of acute self-pity, to be discharged by weeping over
+woes of others. The “Elsie” books, “The Wide, Wide, World.” Confessions
+(anybody’s).
+
+Fourth week.—Patient needs rousing. This is a very critical period, and
+the psychosis of the individual must be carefully studied. No general
+prescription can be given, but the following suggestions are made:
+For elderly Methodist spinster, Victoria Cross novel (preferably that
+alleged to have set a bookstall alight); jaded divorcé (or divorcée),
+“Golden Heart Novelettes”; case of delirium tremens, _Patriot_, or
+other temperance organ. President of the Liberal Union: “_Direct
+Action_,” “Sabotage.” (If these fail, get him to make up his income-tax
+return.) Member of the I.W.W.: Probate lists; failing these, the
+speeches of Irvine and Hughes will be found efficacious. Doctor
+(difficult case, especially at night): works of Mrs. Baker-Eddy, or the
+present article.
+
+Fifth week.—Patient annoyed to hear he is looking better. Mild case:
+Emerson’s Essays (one to be taken after each meal). Obstinate case:
+Degree 1, the Bible; degree 2 (probably a lodge patient), advise to
+make peace with God, and send for a clergyman.
+
+Sixth week.—Patient returns to his wallowing: Hegel or Bertrand
+Russell; Thompson or Lodge, and “Science from an Easy Chair”;
+“Structure and Growth” or “Psychology for Little Tots”; Wells or
+Charles Garvice; _London Punch_ or _The Pink ’Un_; “Horner’s Penny
+Stories” and the _Sunday Circle_; all according to taste.
+
+
+Our National Bulletin
+
+At Fremantle the observant academic on his travels to the Antipodes
+notes the rush of his Australian fellow-passengers for a large, bright
+pink compendium. “Ah!” he thinks to himself, “that national paper of
+theirs!” and at the first opportunity he purchases a copy in order to
+study the manners and customs of the inhabitants.
+
+“Bai Jove!” he gasps weakly, as he opens on a huge and brutal Norman
+Lindsay cartoon, a quite unnecessarily unpleasant sketch by Mack or
+Souter, or (as _The Bulletin_ itself might say) at the allegedly
+humorous caricatures of “Poverty Point,” or “Sundry Shows.” On the Red
+Page he is upset to find Looney’s Shakespeare theory taken seriously,
+the sacred laws of punctuation explicitly and at length, but without
+explanation, denied, and (in “A Satchel of Books”) a snub administered
+to E. V. Lucas, while space is devoted to analysis and appreciation
+of some unheard-of Australian writer. He considers the tone of the
+Society gossip columns “most regrettable” (“vulgar” is his word if
+no Australian is in earshot), and when he turns to Aboriginalities
+for local colour, his refined literary palate is outraged at the—the
+travesty on the English language which he finds. There is perhaps
+the story of an egg-stealing crow, “whose black nibs” carries away
+“bunches” of “this fruit.” And the whole paper is like that! Even
+“Plain English!” From the number of abuses attacked, in provocative
+captions like “Australia for the Asiatics,” “Murder at £4 11s. 3d. a
+Time,” it appears that nothing, except perhaps an occasional piece of
+work by a _Bulletin_ young man, goes right in Australia. Unless our
+academic is a brave man, with sound missionary instincts, he writes
+at once to resign his appointment. He really must refuse to herd with
+these callow vulgarians.
+
+Is _The Bulletin_ really characteristic of Australia? In the long run,
+and with modifications, yes. It is the one paper which every good
+Australian, at home or abroad, reads, and reads with gusto. It contains
+argument, comment, or anecdote about nearly every subject on which
+the Australian is interested. Its opinion may be wrong and its manner
+blatant, but there is never any doubt that it has an opinion, and it
+is never dull for a single sentence. But it is surely the _reductio
+ad absurdum_ of some, as well as the highest power of other, of our
+characteristics. Like the comic writers of the eighteenth century,
+it holds the mirror up to nature—Australian nature—and its mirror is
+always unsentimental and sometimes distorting.
+
+Young nations are self-confident—and so is _The Bulletin_;
+self-confident and bumptious and cock-sure. The Cheerful Cherub must
+certainly have had this paper in mind when he wrote:
+
+    I always envy editors
+      With minds both deep and bright;
+    They always feel so positive
+      That what they think is right.
+
+Whatever the subject, when the hail of argument ceases, the pulverized
+reader wonders why he had not agreed to this before; or, if he still
+has a doubt or objection, he keeps it to himself, because obviously
+it is all his foolishness. Indeed that is _The Bulletin_ attitude
+in every subject and in every paragraph. “It am It, and the other
+fellow is a fool, most probably a damned fool.” _The Bulletin_ really
+has convictions, too; its violence isn’t entirely explained, as the
+psycho-analysts explain swearing, as an attempt to make up for the
+defects of genius by the violence of style. No, _The Bulletin_ knows
+its happy-go-to-football-match average Australian; it is perfectly
+aware that to make him listen to reason you must (and this is the
+reason both for our yellow press and our stump oratory) hold him by
+the scruff of the neck while you shout your lesson in his ear. And so
+_The Bulletin_ hits you in the eye with its red cover, and, having
+caught your attention, rapidly emits a brisk succession of crisp
+ideas, conveyed in a style of studied unexpectedness. It is terse and
+trenchant and clear, though no one could call it nervous or sympathetic
+or scholarly or refined. Those responsible have had extraordinary
+success in achieving uniformity of manner through all their many
+regular and paragraph writers. The essentials are something to say
+(captious for preference), and trenchancy in saying it. Probably in no
+other paper of its size are there fewer tiresome circumlocutions. Even
+Death is briskly handled. “Died last week ...” begins the paragraph.
+_De mortuis_, too, not _nil nisi bonum_, but whatever you like. _The
+Bulletin_ doesn’t think much of classical learning, and perhaps it has
+thrown a courteous precept or two overboard at the same time.
+
+But the paper has a code of its own, an air of sea-green
+incorruptibility and impartiality, and a fearlessness in defying the
+conventional, which, even if it is sometimes only the aggressiveness
+of crudity, makes its value more than that of a _succès de scandale_.
+Politically it stands for two or three principles, which are rooted
+(and which it assisted to root) in Australian conviction, and for two
+or three others which will probably become so. It stands for a White
+Australia and Protection and Self-Defence; it is anti-Imperial and
+anti-Party and anti-Hughes, but no one can doubt that it is always
+and wholly pro-Australian. It is the critic of all parties, with an
+opinion as far removed from stick-in-the-mud Liberalism as it is from
+the Party that Declines to Work. Its treatment of Royalty is probably
+characteristic of the bulk of Australians. It wishes us to understand
+that it holds no brief for Royalty, but that it likes and respects
+“the Princelet” for himself, and wishes it could rescue him from the
+pitiful efforts at entertainment of the vulgar Sassiety and official
+classes. “Refer to us for information on Teddy’s tastes. Young Windsor
+and we are pals,” it rather patronizingly suggests. Imagine H.R.H.
+having a _Bulletin_ and Bohemian good time with Harrison O. and Henry
+Horsecollar and Pat O’Maori and the rest! (Though occasionally one
+wonders whether they live in so hectic a Bohemia as they would have us
+believe.) For the pompous and the stupid they have no pity; to Gaud
+Mayors and Gaud Mayoresses and Gent Helps they mete out treatment
+savage or contemptuous, according to the degree of offence. Pitiless
+publicity and offensive epithet are _The Bulletin’s_ ungenerous
+treatment of inexperience and human weakness alike with incompetence
+and considered roguery and political opposition.
+
+The aspiring Australian inevitably submits his literary productions to
+_The Bulletin_. Its frank and wholesome judgments are what he wants.
+Its reviews of literary works are in accordance with the best typically
+Australian opinion, though in its admiration for the vigorous and the
+original and the characteristic it fails to appreciate some of the
+fundamentally sound and admirable achievement which the conventional
+often represents. The sound discipline it imposes upon writers of
+verse is in striking contrast with this. In prose, too, of course,
+it insists on grammatical English, but scholarship, and much that
+scholarship implies, are alien to _The Bulletin_ (and to the young
+Australian?) temperament. It is so much easier and more flattering
+to ignorance to assume that mere common-sense can take precedence of
+intelligence which is instructed and disciplined. In noticing a work on
+sociology, ostentatiously to give its author—and one so well known—as
+“a” Professor J. J. Findlay, is a perverse and provincial parade of
+ignorance and detachment which discredit the writer. A reviewer should
+at least know the literature and personnel of his subject.
+
+_The Bulletin_ is full of energy and character and youth. Like youth,
+in its horror of being Wowserish it assumes a bold bad air, but
+fundamentally it has the wholesomeness as well as the intolerance of
+youth. With the passage of years perhaps its intolerance and its slang
+will wear off together, for most of us do not want to see the rise of
+a mongrel Australian tongue akin to the worst kind of Americanese.
+It deals with everything from sport to business, from literature to
+politics, and all with an absence of qualm as to its ability that of
+itself inspires confidence. That it excludes certain types of writer
+is no reproach, for unity requires selection. Despite the following
+imaginary list, the present writer is graciously pleased to admit that
+he for one would not like to do without his weekly _Bulletin_.
+
+
+ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.
+
+ Elia: Using “Roast Pig”; returning “Dream Children” and “Poor
+ Relations” for decent burial.... R.L.S.: Yarn has the right stuff in
+ it. Keep on.... “Paradise Lost”: Send a couple of bullock drays for
+ the M.S. What’s it all about, anyway?... Walt Whitman: You can’t get
+ away with that verse, not in this paper.... A.A.M.: Joke feeble. You
+ might try it on London _Punch_.... Alice Meynell: What do we care
+ about your blooming kids?... Sage of Chelsea: Got a grouch about
+ something, haven’t you? Work it off on the woodheap.... Walter Pater:
+ Take it away.... Robert B.: Just misses being a shocking example....
+ Bagehot: Laodicean stuff not in our line. For Gawsake lose your temper
+ sometimes.... Bernard Partridge: Drawing accurate, but not enough kick
+ in the figures. So the holy lady with the wings is Peace, is she?...
+ W.W.:
+
+    “A primrose by the river’s brim,
+    A simple primrose was to him,
+    And it was nothing more.”
+
+ Beats us what more it ought to have been—two primroses? Our Temperance
+ Editor protests.
+
+
+Nigger
+
+
+I.
+
+Master was away all the afternoon; it was very dull. He did not come
+back in the evening. Nigger was uneasy. Once during the night he
+slipped his chain and went in search.
+
+“Perhaps he’ll be in when I get back,” he thought hopefully.
+
+And later: “He’s sure to be here for breakfast.”
+
+But he wasn’t.
+
+Nigger searched every room and sniffed the furniture. No master.
+Nigger was lonely. He cuddled up on the forbidden cushions of the
+garden-seat with Simonette, waiting for master to come whizzing round
+the corner. He opened an eye at a noisy cycle, and cocked his ear for
+a motor. He trotted up the drive, he wheeled sharply round to the
+stables, he cut back, barking, to master’s room. No master.
+
+After a little dejected self-examination Nigger paid a rapid visit to
+several rabbit-holes. Whatever the strain, duty must be done. He came
+back to be comforted.
+
+“I know,” he yapped joyously, “he’s afraid to come home; he’s hiding
+behind a tree.”
+
+But he wasn’t.
+
+“Then I darn well hope,” snapped Nigger, “that they’ll shut him up for
+a day when he does turn up.” He sighed heavily.
+
+But they didn’t. They shut Nigger up instead.
+
+
+II.
+
+The sun shone on the pale sodden summer grass, and the raindrops on the
+trees glistened. The clouds were rolling back over the plain and the
+sea. Nigger wanted a walk. He danced down the drive, and looked back to
+see if anyone were following. No one. Nigger wagged his tail and tried
+again. The invitation was ignored. Nigger drooped his tail (what there
+was of it) and came back.
+
+Simonette got her coat; Nigger wagged; an umbrella; Nigger sprang into
+the air and spun round and round and barked. Simonette would indicate
+the general direction of the walk, and he, Nigger, could introduce all
+the variety. Simonette went over the hill; so did Nigger—and right and
+left, too; he knew all the _best_ rabbit-holes.
+
+But Simonette heard him tell little kennel-bound Kiwi, “Oh, just a
+middling walk. Better than nothing, of course. But if only a man had
+been here...!”
+
+And since master came back Nigger hasn’t even spoken to Simonette.
+
+
+
+
+Miscellaneous
+
+
+The Queen City of the South
+
+Writers about the Old World can take so much for granted. Even the
+Colonial knows what to expect when the scene is laid in Tooting,
+Maida Vale, or the _Boul’ Mich’_. He is intimate with some of the
+geographical details, and with the social atmosphere of very different
+parts of London and Paris. Regent Street, Clapham Junction, and the
+Edgeware Road are as atmospheric for him as the Domain and Toorak.
+The writer of the New World has no such advantage. He cannot be
+certain that even the names of his capital cities will be recognized,
+and he knows that few readers abroad (abroad, for him, is the
+Northern Hemisphere) will care to learn even the general outlines
+of God-knows-what insignificant citylet. Yet Australian States and
+cities, nay, the very suburbs, are almost as broadly distinct and as
+superficially varied as anything in the Old World, even though they are
+not as mellow or as complex; and our citizens are as much moulded by
+their surroundings.
+
+Some years ago Foster Fraser tried to help us out as he whizzed through
+each capital. Thus he labelled Sydney “for pleasure,” Melbourne “for
+business,” and Adelaide “for culture.” But Adelaide is the only city
+that is satisfied with his judgment. All six capitals bridle with
+pleasure when “the Queen City of the South” is mentioned, which, as any
+South Australian will tell you, is absurd; every unbiassed person knows
+that the phrase is only a descriptive variant for Adelaide.
+
+The only superiority freely accorded to Adelaide by her sister cities
+is that of piety. The reason is partly the number of her churches, but
+far more, I think, a malicious disinclination to let drop the legend
+of our mayor who veiled with decent calico our Venus and our Hercules.
+Some of our many later statues more rightly bring a blush to the
+aesthetic cheek of the young person, but not, alas, because they are
+unclad.
+
+South Australia is a long, narrow State running down the middle of
+the continent from the centre to the sea, from which, and her port,
+Adelaide is not seven miles distant. The cattle tracks of the dry, hot
+(and cold) Far North, and all the railways through the wheat and sheep
+and copper areas, and all good roads everywhere, lead towards Adelaide.
+That Queen City herself lies like a jewel on the broad and beautiful
+plain, in the bend of the arm of hills which sweep inland from the
+shore. The heart of it is a square mile of broad streets intersecting
+at right angles, bound by gardened terraces, and secured from the rough
+jostling and elbowing of the suburbs by broad belts of park land sacred
+to browsing cows and horses, cricket, tennis, football, and bowls. East
+Terrace has specialized in markets, for it lies nearest the hills and
+the vegetable gardens; West Terrace faces the monuments and the sad
+little mounds of a cemetery. Within these confines are five tree-shaded
+lawns where children may play, and seats for those who choose to watch
+the gay flower-beds. To the south are crowded streets and populous
+lanes, lined mainly with dwellings; to the middle and north business
+has developed.
+
+Three or four shopping streets for womenkind, ten or twelve streets
+of offices for men, and some of warehouses and factories, are so far
+enough for this hub of the State. King William Street bisects it from
+north to south, lined with banks and shops and huge hotels (huge for
+us, you know), and cutting it at right angles is Rundle Street, a
+kind of Drapers’ Row. Next to Rundle Street, and parallel with it, is
+North Terrace, where the chambers of doctors and dentists intermingle
+with warehouses. The Terrace is broad and treed and gardened like a
+boulevard, and even along its garden and pedestrian side buildings have
+been allowed. Here are the Railway Station and Parliament House, and,
+east of King William Street, Government House behind its palm trees
+and lawns, the Public Reading Rooms and Library, the Art Gallery, the
+University, and the big Exhibition Building, which forms one entrance
+to an Oval and Showground. Still further east is the long red-bricked
+General Hospital, with its wide, shady lawn, and the ironwork entrance
+to the lovely Botanic Gardens.
+
+At the back of all these, between sloping banks of grass and flowers,
+flows the Torrens. There is a little embarrassment about showing our
+river to visitors, lest they should wish to row too far west or east,
+and we South Australians do not care to expose our limitations to
+dwellers on Thameside. The fact is that our river has to be carefully
+saved up and dammed back for the purpose, and once a year we empty
+it for excavation and repairs. Some precisians call it a lake—an
+artificial lake. One midwinter, when the mud-banks gleamed grey and
+slimy, and only a narrow trickle forced a way along the middle of the
+bed, we were subjected to civic humiliation. The Governor-General
+announced a hasty and unpremeditated visit. Every effort was made to
+fill the Torrens against his Excellency’s arrival, but despite all that
+man could do we had to hurry the representative of majesty past a very
+meagre stream.
+
+This north end of the city is undoubtedly the loveliest. Here the
+line of lower roofs is broken by towers and spires and miniature
+sky-scrapers rising above the quaint architecture of a cruder time and
+art. And it is over this north end of the city, with its corrugated
+sky-line, its river and its lawns, that the slender Cathedral looks,
+standing on a hill above churches and houses whose bases are lost in
+greenery. East and south are pretty suburbs where each house stands in
+its own garden, but only in North Adelaide are the homes so spacious,
+so serene, so certain of their beauty and their fitness. Oddly enough,
+this retreat of wealth and leisure has for western neighbour the region
+where the gas and soap and bricks are made, where hides are tanned and
+laundry work is done. But then North Adelaide holds up her skirts with
+jewelled hands and stands clear of the squalor of Bowden and Hindmarsh
+by a whole park width.
+
+When electric cars were brought to Adelaide the Municipal Tramways
+Trust had the humorous notion, or perhaps it was only the business
+instinct, fortified by democratic principle, of whizzing the North
+Adelaide cars down the hill and round to Bowden. And so pretty misses
+with books or racquets or clubs rub shoulders with stout old parties
+laden with string bags and parcels, and dingy women are bitterly
+amused when their grubby offspring wipe their boots on the dresses
+of remote and silken ladies. The fastidious gaze reluctantly on the
+lashless, pink-lidded outdoor patients, on the monstrous and deformed.
+Oh, the classes meet the masses in the Hill Street car!
+
+
+A Literature in the Making
+
+Criticism often seems presumptuous, yet until we have examined and
+weighed, how can we set a price—appreciate? For us who are but
+amateurs, and who have taken our growth in a province, the attempt to
+fix the price (as against assessing the value for us, which is always
+legitimate, for it reveals our own position rather than the subject’s)
+of the great writers of the world is true presumption; our legitimate
+training in criticism we get by exercising our discrimination on our
+unfortunate contemporaries and compeers, the not-yet, the perhaps
+not-to-be, acclaimed.
+
+In 1916, G. Hassell & Son published a small brown pocket volume,
+“Poems, Real and Imaginative,” by M. R. Walker. Like so many other
+little books between 1914 and 1919, it was intended to aid the funds
+of the Red Cross; unlike, on the other hand, so many of its companions,
+it really deserved for its own sake the sympathetic attention of all
+literary Australians. _The Bulletin_ was rather off-handed with the
+little stranger, for _The Bulletin_, hardy parent that it is, often
+favours the lusty, the clamorous, even the violent and rude, more than
+the child with the low, sweet voice; but there must have been many who
+pondered the twenty-four sets of verses in the wee book, for it ran
+into a second edition.
+
+It has been out long enough now for us to estimate it impartially.
+
+Not a mine of pure gold, it is good enough to be mistaken for such by
+the uncritical, bad enough to have its qualities entirely overlooked
+by the supercilious. All is very fair verse, bits are true poetry; but
+perhaps no piece, however short, is pure poetry throughout.
+
+The topics are the simple, natural, age-old topics of the poet—the sea
+and the moon and the mountains, love, friendship, and country. Of these
+Miss Walker is most adequate to the first group, to “Sea Pictures,” “A
+June Evening,” “To the Ouse.” Read this fragment of blank verse from
+“Half-moon Bay”:—
+
+                            High overhead
+    The forest stretching to the seven peaks
+    Is beautiful in slopes of wilding gum,
+    Wattle, and box. The sad shea-oaks,
+    Huddled together down a windy ridge,
+    Whisper their troublous sighing to the waves
+    A thousand feet below.
+    The coves and inlets of the circling bay
+    Are floored with giant pebbles, and the wash
+    Goes sweeping up the deep rock-riven cracks
+    To break in shallows on the level ledge,
+    And drop again in sparkling waterfall.
+
+The felicities of picture and of sound in this are typical of her art,
+but it misses the sunshine and open-air buoyancy of “At Maria Island.”
+
+    Oh the yellow broom is growing
+    On the sand-banks by the sea,
+    And the breezes blowing, blowing,
+    Mingle with the waters’ flowing
+        In a haunting melody.
+
+    There the gulls are rising, falling,
+    To the heaving of the tide,
+    Listen to them calling, calling,
+    To the fishermen a-hauling
+        Nets, out where the schooners ride.
+
+Perhaps “At Maria Island” comes nearest to maintaining throughout
+the same technical level, and the same trend of theme. A short
+and convenient instance of the vague but disconcerting shifting
+of the direction of the thought, and a certain incompleteness or
+fragmentariness, that characterize most of the pieces, is “Sea
+Pictures.”
+
+    Know you the swinging of wild water after storm,
+      The racing breeze that sings along the sand,
+    And rocks, deep-flung, where sea-birds love to swarm,
+      Wave-weary for the land?
+
+    There are fair nights in summer on the sea,
+      And moonlight falling gentlier on the waves
+    Than echo’s sighs, borne back again to me
+      From dim, sea-haunted caves.
+
+Here the thought does not march from one verse to the next; rather
+there is a turning away from the question that links poet and reader in
+eager sympathy, to a mood of brooding, personal reminiscence. In “Blue”
+the jerkiness is conscious, and is covered by a conceit impossible
+to the serious poetic mood. In “There is a Land” it manifests itself
+as obscurity. Poetry is in the air, but the poet cannot freely draw
+breath. In the eighteen lines of this poem are examples of nearly
+all Miss Walker’s qualities; there is inspiration, but inadequately
+expressed, a passionate clutching at a meaning that eludes the words,
+and comes out rather baldly, as in the line,
+
+    Ah Death; and some pass on, that know not and are blind.
+
+There is technical failure—and technical felicity.
+
+                                  ... the soul
+    Cries to the silence with a living cry—
+    A whisper that goes by upon the wind,
+    A breaking wave upon some lonely shore,
+    The list’ning hush of mountains in the dawn,
+    And lo! the Voice! An echo in the soul!
+    And then—the level stillness of the days.
+
+The irregularity in the pulse of the thought is found also in some
+constructions which, though grammatical, are unexpected and not at
+first obvious, where, for instance, we were expecting one object to be
+described, and find that the epithet applies to another, the thought
+having moved on; it is also reflected in a technique so frequent as to
+become a mannerism:—
+
+                                  ... a Voice
+    Calling unto its own, that, oft, the soul ...
+    As sullen seas that, sweeping o’er some reef ...
+    Where, low, the boobyallas keep....
+
+These halts and returns would not be noticed in longer poems, or in the
+poems read separately; but the ear of the student begins to wait for
+them, as it does for some inevitable voice-pauses at line-endings where
+the meaning should trip on.
+
+                    ... tree-guarded from the light
+    Flinging its wide farewell across the sky.
+
+(This also is an instance of the unexpected construction referred to
+above; we are expecting a further description of “deep wells of shade,”
+what we get is an adjectival clause about “light”; perhaps it is the
+voice-pause that gives this feeling and sends us back again upon our
+construing.)
+
+    ... the fishermen a-hauling
+    Nets,
+
+in the quotation above also pulls us up with a jerk.
+
+There are other tricks of manner that grow monotonous. “O Moon,” “O Son
+of Essex,” “Ah, Love,” “Ah, Death,” “Oh have you ever stood alone to
+watch ...” Apostrophe and exclamation so reiterated point to poverty
+of expression, to a labouring to say what cannot get itself said. And
+there are commonplace lines, prose in metre—
+
+    O moon, that risest now, how beautiful thou art.
+        Poor little girl, you did not wish to die.
+
+Perhaps there is bathos—
+
+    A little, wandering, broken-hearted child.
+
+But not all this can do away with the many triumphs, the recurrent
+charms for eye and ear—
+
+    Thy waters washing into shallow pools ...
+
+                                ... a moorèd boat
+            Asway upon the idle-swinging tide ...
+
+    The islands to the north were bathed in sleep,
+    Their cliffs stood out in sunshine to the sea,
+    Only the murmur, murmur, of the waves,
+    Broke the long silence unto you and me.
+
+The songs and the scenes and the thought are not joyous. Beauty of
+nature, and loves of friends, or man and maid, induce wistful thoughts.
+The sadness may be explicit—
+
+    But in the days, ay me! the empty days,
+    The long, long days that lead to no fireside,
+    Philosophy’s a thing to call a friend,
+    To hold to, and to cherish, lest one fail,
+    Afraid before the vista of the years.
+
+Or it may sigh itself out in falling cadence, as in the song on page
+24, where what should be a sigh of ecstacy falls on the ear like a
+foreboding. But the melancholy is never morbid. It may be hopeless, but
+it is resigned and controlled and quietly courageous.
+
+Australia is too young to produce great poetry, for that never blossoms
+from unacclimatized minds. But the necessary conditions are gradually
+emerging. Australians are increasingly in sympathy with their country
+and its qualities: its sunlight, its seas and mountains and plains and
+deserts, its sheep and its wheat and forests and minerals, are all
+giving out their emanations into the mental medium where poetry forms;
+there, too, our traditions are being made or absorbed. We have not yet
+the plethora of elements from which the great poetic souls take shape,
+but crystals more or less characteristic are being precipitated from
+such material as there is. Those of to-day may be small and cloudy and
+faultily-shapen, but they presage a beauty and a perfection in the
+poetry of the future.
+
+
+  G. HASSELL & SON.
+  PRINTERS & PUBLISHERS,
+  CURRIE ST., ADELAIDE.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75957 ***