Monday brought some softening (helped by the fact that Sister Mary was on duty at breakfast-time, so that I escaped the addition of punishment to hunger), and, as the week wore slowly by, hope rose in my breast once more, and with it a return of what I now regard as the common-sense prescience which made me hesitate to adopt a swagman's life. I could not honestly say that I had any definite ideas as to another and more reputable sort of occupation or career. As yet, I had not. But I did vaguely feel that there would be derogation in becoming what my father would have called a 'tramp.'

My father's memory, the question of what he would have thought of it, affected my attitude materially. He had accepted it as axiomatic, I thought, that his son must be a gentleman. My present lot as an 'inmate' of St. Peter's hardly seemed to fit the axiom, somehow; and Ted, whatever I might think or say about 'beggin'' or the like, was all the friend I had or seemed likely to have, and a really good fellow at that. But withal a certain stubbornly resistant quality in me asserted that there would be a downward step for me, though not for Ted, or for any of my fellow orphans, in taking to the road; that the step might prove irrevocable, and that I ought not to take it. I dare say there was something of the snob in me. Anyhow, that was how I felt about it. Also, I remember deriving a certain comically stern sort of satisfaction from contemplation of the spectacle of myself, alone, unaided, declining to stoop, even though stooping should bring me freedom from the Orphanage! Yes, there was a certain egotistical satisfaction in that thought.

Ted came to see me again on the next Sunday, but our day was far less cheery than its predecessor had been. We were good friends still, but there was a subtle constraint between us, as was proved by the fact that Ted did not again mention the suggestion of my taking to the road with him. Also, Ted was for the moment a wage-earner, working during fixed and regular hours for an employer; and I knew he hated that. In such case he felt as one of the mountain-bred brumbies (wild horses) of that countryside might be supposed to feel, when caught, branded, and forced between shafts.

On the following Sunday Ted's downcast constraint was much more pronounced, and I saw plainly that my Sabbath visitor was on the eve of a breakaway. The name of the farmer for whom he had been working was Mannasseh Ford, and, having such a name, the man was always spoken of in just that way.

'I pretty near bruk my back finishing Mannasseh Ford's paddick last night,' explained Ted moodily. 'There was three days' fair work left in it when I got there in the morning. But I meant gettin' shut of it, an' I did. Mannasseh Ford opened his eyes pretty wide when I called up for me money las' night, an' he looked over the paddick. Wanted to take me on regler, he did; pounder week an' all found, he said. I thanked him kindly, him an' his pounder week! Well, he said he'd make it twenty-five shillin', an' I thanked him for that.'

Thanks clearly meant refusal with Ted, and I confess he rose higher in my esteem somehow, for the fact that he could actually refuse what to me seemed like wealth. I recalled the fact that my father had paid Ted exactly half this amount, and had found him quite willing to stay with us for half that again, or even for occasional tobacco money. Perhaps there was a mercenary vein in me at the time. I think it likely. The talk of my fellow orphans was largely of wages, and materialism dominated the atmosphere in which I lived. I know this refusal of twenty-five shillings a week and 'all found' struck me as tolerably reckless; splendid, in a way, but somewhat foolhardy, and I hinted as much to Ted.

'Och, bother him an' his twenty-five shillin'!' said Ted. 'Just because I cleared his old paddick, he thinks I'm a workin' bullick. He offered me thirty shillin' after, if ye come to that; an' I told him he hadn't money enough in the bank to keep me. Neither has he.'

'But, Ted,' I urged, 'why not? It's good money, and you've got to work somewhere.'

'Aye,' said Ted, his constraint lifting for a moment to admit the right vagabondish twinkle into his blue eyes. 'Somewhere! An' sometimes. But not there, mate, an' not all the time, thank ye; not me. It's all right for Mannasseh Ford; but, spare me days, I'd sooner be in me grave.'

I pondered this for a time, while a voice within me kept on repeating with sickening certainty: 'He's going away; he's going away. You've lost your friend; you've lost your friend.' And then, as one thrusts a foot into cold water before taking a plunge: 'Well, then, what shall you do, Ted?' I asked him. But, for the moment, I was not to have the plunge.

'Oh, if ye come to that,' he said, weakly smiling, 'I've money in hand, an' to spare. Look at the wealth o' me.' And he drew out for my edification a little bundle of greasy one-pound notes, which, for me, certainly had a very substantial look. I knew instinctively that my friend wanted me to help him out by pursuing the inquiry; but for the time I shirked it, and we talked of other things. Later in the day I returned to it, as a moth to a candle, undeterred, partly impelled thereto, in fact, by the assured foreknowledge that the process would hurt.

'But what will you do, Ted, now you've given up Mannasseh Ford? Will you take another job round the Creek here, or——'

I paused, scanning my only friend's face, and seeing my loss of him writ plainly in his downcast eyes and half-shamed expression. (I am not sure but what there may have been more of the human boy, the child, in Ted, than in myself.)

'Oh, well, mate,' he said haltingly, and then stopped altogether. He was drawing an intricate pattern in the dust with the blade of his pen-knife, a favourite pastime with bushmen. The pause was pregnant. At last he looked up with a toss of his head. 'Oh, come on, mate,' he said impatiently. 'Swim across to-night, an' we'll beat up Queensland way. I tell ye, travellin' 's fine. Ye've got no boss to say do this an' that. You goes y'r own way at y'r own gait. Ye'd better come.'

'So you'll go, Ted. I knew you would,' I said, musing in my rather old-fashioned way. It seems a smallish matter enough now; but I know that at the time I was conscious of making a momentous sacrifice, of taking a step of epoch-making significance. Somehow, the very greatness of the sacrifice made me the more determined about it. I should lose my only friend, a devastating loss; and the more clearly I realised how naked this loss would leave me, the more convinced I felt that my decision was right. There is, of course, a kind of gluttony in self-denial; one's appetite for sacrifice, and particularly in youth, may be undeniably avid.

'Well, I did try to stop,' he muttered, almost sullenly for him. And then, with that toss of his head, and the glimmering of a frank smile: 'But I can't stick it. Humpin' a swag's about all I'm fit for, I reckon. You're right, too, it's no game for your father's son.' And here his kindly face lost all trace of anything but friendliness. 'Only, what beats me is what in the world else can ye do, mewed up in this—this blessed work'us. That's what has me beat.'

The crisis was passed, and with it the last of Ted's shamefaced constraint. It was admitted between us that he must be off again to his wandering, and that I must stay behind. And now Ted had no thought for anything but my welfare. There was no more awkwardness between us, but only the warmth of this good fellow's real affection, and the almost agreeable melancholy and self-righteous consciousness of wise denial which possessed me. Ted fumbled under his coat with a packet of some food he had brought me: 'Spare me days, the cats might give a lad a bit o' bread to his breakfast—drat 'em!'—and, finally pressed it into my hands, with injunctions to be careful in opening it, as he had put a scrap of writing in with it, for me to remember him by.

And so we parted, with no shadow on our friendship, on the track down to the punt.

But though my friend was gone, after these three Sunday visits, and I was alone again, the influence of his coming remained. I should not revert to the unhoping inertia of my previous state. Some instinct told me that. And the instinct was right. My curiosity had been too fully roused. My relationship to the world of people outside St. Peter's had been definitely re-established by the kindly, rather childlike, bushman, and would not again be allowed to lapse. The mere talk of swimming to the wharf, of cutting the painter, of walking forth into the real world which was not ruled by a Sister-in-charge—all this had wrought a permanent change in me.

The 'scrap of writin'' fumblingly inserted into the packet of cakes was no writing of Ted's, but a crumpled, greasy one-pound Bank of New South Wales note; one of his little store, useless to me at St. Peter's—yes; but, even as my eyes pricked to the emotion of gratitude, some inner consciousness told me my friend's gift would yet prove of very real use to me outside the Orphanage, one day. And, before Ted came, I had been unable to descry any future outside the Orphanage.

V

I do not remember the exact period that elapsed between Ted's departure and the visit of the artist, Mr. Rawlence. But it must have been early winter when Ted was at Myall Creek, because my fifteenth birthday fell at about that time; and it was spring when Mr. Rawlence came, for I know the wattle was in bloom then. Very likely it was in August or September, three or four months after Ted's departure. At all events my mind was still much occupied by thoughts of the outside world and of my future.

Some one had told me that a Sydney artist, a Mr. Rawlence, had permission to land on the island, as he wished to sketch there. But he had not been much about the house or the yards, and I had not seen him. And then, one late afternoon, when I had arrived at the milking-yards a few minutes before the others of the milking gang, I stood with two pails in my right hand, leaning over the slip-rails at the very spot upon which I had caught my first glimpse of Ted at St. Peter's. I was thinking of that Sunday when I had recognised his broad shoulders, and recalling the thrill that recognition had brought me.

The romantic hazardousness of life had for some considerable time now made its appeal felt by me. It seemed infinitely curious and interesting to me that I and my father ever should have known Ted intimately, as one who shared our curious life on the Livorno; Ted who was born and bred there in Werrina; we who came there across thousands of miles of ocean from the world's far side, from Putney, from places whose names Ted had never heard. And then that I should have walked down to that milking-yard with my pails, and, so to say, stumbled upon Ted, after his long wanderings in Queensland, where at this moment he was probably wandering again, hundreds of miles away and, possibly, thinking of me, of that same milking-yard, of these identical slip-rails and splintery grey fence. A wonderful and mysterious business, this life in the great world, I thought; and with that I threw up my left hand to lift the rails down.

'Oh, hold on! Don't move! Stay as you were a minute!'

I jumped half out of my skin as these words, apparently spoken in my very ear, reached me; and, wheeling abruptly round, I saw a man wearing a very large grey felt hat, and holding pencils and a paper block in his hands, peering at me from a little wooded hummock at the end of the cowshed. The skin about his eyes was all puckered up, he held a pencil cross-wise between his white teeth, and was shaking his head from side to side as though very much put about over something.

'What a pity! It's gone now,' he said, as he strode down the slope towards me.

He clearly was disappointed about something; but yet I thought that never since the days when my father was with me had I heard any one speak more pleasantly, or seen any one smile in kindlier fashion. Later, I realised that no one I had met since my father's death possessed anything resembling the sort of manner, address, intonation, or mental attitude of this Mr. Rawlence. I had no theories then about social divisions, and the like; but here, I thought, was a man who would find nobody in the district having anything in common with himself. By the same token, I thought, had my father been alive this newcomer would have recognised a possible companion in him. And, finally, as Mr. Rawlence came to a standstill before me, this absurd reflection flitted through my mind:

'If he only knew it, there's me! But he will never know—how could he?'

The absurd vanity and audacity of the thought made me blush like a bashful schoolgirl. The ridiculous pretentiousness of the thought that in me, the 'inmate' of St. Peter's, this splendid person could find a companion, impressed me now so painfully that I felt it must be plainly visible; that the visitor must see and be scornfully amused by it. Yet, with really extraordinary cordiality, he was holding out his right hand in salutation. Here again my awkwardness made me bungle. What he meant by his gesture I could not think. Some amusing trick, perhaps. It did not occur to me in that moment of self-abasement that he wished to shake an 'inmate's' hand.

'Won't you shake?' he asked, with that smile of his—so unlike any expression one saw on folks' faces at St. Peter's.

'I beg your pardon,' I faltered, and gave him a limp hand, reviling myself inwardly for conduct which I felt would utterly and for ever condemn me in this gentleman's eyes. 'Of course,' I told myself, 'he'll be thinking: "What can one expect from these unfortunate inmates—friendless orphans, living on charity?"' As a fact, I suppose no man's demeanour could have been less suggestive of any such uncharitable thought.

'I suspect you thought it like my cheek, yelling at you like that. The fact is, I had just begun to sketch you. See!'

He showed me his sketch-block, upon which I saw in outline the figure of a boy carrying pails and leaning over a fence. What chiefly caught my eye in this was the reproduction of my absurd trousers, one torn leg reaching midway down the calf, the other in jagged scallops about my knee. He might have idealised my rags a little, I thought, in my ignorance. No doubt I had been better pleased if Mr. Rawlence had endowed me in the sketch with the dress of, say, a smart clerk. And, apart from the artistic aspect, the man who would sniff at this as evidence of contemptible snobbishness in me, would take a more lenient view, perhaps, if he had ever spent a year or two in an orphanage like St. Peter's.

'It has the makings of quite a good little character study, I fancy. Later on, when you're free—perhaps, to-morrow—I'll get you to give me half an hour, if you will, to make a real sketch of it.'

It was in my mind that if only I could make a remark of the right kind I might immediately differentiate myself in this artist's eyes from the general run of 'inmates.' This again may have been an unworthy and snobbish thought, but I know it was mine at the time, based in my mind upon the unvoiced but profound conviction that I was different in essence from the other orphans. This was not mere conceit, I think, because it emanated rather from pride in my father than from any exalted opinion of myself. But, whatever the rights of it, no suitable remark came to me. Indeed, beyond an incoherent mumble over the hand-shaking, I might have been a mute for all the part I had so far taken in this interview. And just then I caught a glimpse of Sister Agatha emerging from behind the wood-stack at the end of the vegetable garden, and that gave me something else to think about.

'Excuse me!' I said, angrily conscious that I was flushing again and that all my limbs were in my way, and that I was presenting a most uncouth appearance. 'I must get on with the milking.' And then I made my plunge. 'Perhaps you would speak to Sister-in-charge. Not this one here, but Sister-in-charge,' I hurriedly added as Sister Agatha drew nearer, her thin lips tightly compressed, her gimlet eyes full of promise of ear-tweakings. 'She would perhaps give me leave to—to do anything you wanted. I—I am sure she would. Good-bye!'

Having hurriedly fired this last shot, I bolted into the milking-shed. Just for an instant I had succeeded in meeting Mr. Rawlence's eye. I had very much wanted to show him something, as, for example, that I would gladly do anything he liked, even to the extent of allowing him to trample all over me—if only I had been a free agent. In some way I had longed to claim kinship with him, in a humble fashion; to say that I understood him and his kind, despite my ragged trousers and scarred, dusty bare feet. Now, with a pail between my knees, and my head in a cow's flank, I was very sure I had utterly failed to convey anything, except that I was an uncouth creature. My eyes smarted from mortification; and the grotesque thought crossed my mind that if only I had had a photograph of my father, and could have shown it to Mr. Rawlence, the position would have been quite different! I suppose I must have been a rather fatuous youth. Also, I was obsessed to the point of mania by the determination not to become a veritable 'inmate' of St. Peter's, like my fellows there, however long I might be condemned to live in the place.

During the next three days I was greatly depressed by the fact that I never caught a glimpse of the artist anywhere. In fact, it was said that he had gone away from Myall Creek altogether. And then, greatly to my secret joy, the Sister-in-charge sent for me one morning and said:

'There is an artist gentleman coming here, Mr. Rawlence. You are to do whatever he tells you, and carry his things for him while he is here. Be careful now. I have word from Father O'Malley about this. Be sure you don't neglect your milking. You can tell the gentleman when you have to go to that. You can do some wood-chopping after tea, if he should want you in your chopping time. Run along now, and go over in the punt with Tim when he goes to meet the gentleman.'

It would seem the good-will of the Great Powers had once more been invoked in connection with me; and I learned afterwards that Mr. Rawlence had not left the district, but had been staying in Werrina for a few days. While there, no doubt, he had met Father O'Malley, and very casually, I dare say, had mentioned his fancy for sketching me. At the time these trivial events stirred me deeply. That Father O'Malley should have been approached seemed to me a fact of high portent. If only I had had a portrait of my father!

As Destiny ruled it, Mr. Rawlence spent but the one day at St. Peter's, in place of the enthralling vista of days, each of more romantic interest than its predecessor, of which I had dreamed. He had news demanding his return to Sydney; and, as he said, he ought not to have come out to St. Peter's even for this one day. But he wanted to complete his sketch. So that, in a sense, he really came to see me again. This radiant being's swift and important movements in the great world outside the Orphanage were directly influenced by me. It was a stirring thought, and went some way toward compensating me for the shattered vista of many days spent in leisurely attendance upon the man belonging to my father's order. It was thus I thought of him.

I cannot of course recall every word spoken and every little event of that momentous day, and it would serve no useful purpose if I could. It was important for me, less by reason of anything remarkable in itself, than by virtue of what was going on in my own mind while I posed for Mr. Rawlence (possibly in more senses than one) and subsequently carried his paraphernalia for him, showed him his way about the island, and generally attended upon him. I had hoped that he would question me about my life before coming to St. Peter's, and he did. By this time I was at my ease with him, and I think I told my brief story intelligently. In any case, I interested him; so much I saw clearly and with satisfaction. I noted, too, that he was impressed by the name of the London newspaper with which my father had been connected before his determination to seek peace in the wilds.

'H'm!' 'Ah!' 'Strange!' 'A recluse indeed!' 'And you think he had never seen this—St. Peter's, that is, when he wrote the letter arranging for you to come here? Well, to be sure, there was little choice, of course, little choice enough, and in such a lonely, isolated place.'

I remember these among his exclamations and comments upon my story. And then he asked me what ideas I had about my future, and I told him, none. I also told him of Ted's visit and of his offer to me, and my refusal of it.

'Yes,' he said, 'that was wise of you, I think; that certainly was best. In some countries now, in the Old World, one might advise you to stick to the country. But here— Well, you know, there must be some real reason for the rapid growth of the Australian capital cities, and the comparative stagnation of the countryside. The more cultured people won't leave the capitals, and that affects country life. Yes, but why won't they leave the cities? They do in the Old World, for I've met 'em in the villages and country towns there. But why is it?'

Mr. Rawlence could hardly have expected an answer from me; but part of his charm was that he made it seem, while he talked and I listened, that we were jointly discussing the subject of his monologue, and that he was much interested by my views. He had that air; his smile and his manner made one feel that.

'Well, you know,' he continued, 'it must be partly the crude material difficulties which the actual and physical conditions of country life here present to educated people, and partly the fact that our country in Australia has got no traditions, no associations, no atmosphere. It is just a negation, a wilderness; not a rural civilisation, but a mere gap in civilisation. Pioneering is picturesque enough—in fiction. In fact, it permits of no leisure and no idealisation; and without those things——'

Mr. Rawlence paused with outstretched hands, shrugging shoulders, and the smile of one who should say—'You understand, of course.' My modest contribution was in three words, delivered with emphatic gestures of acquiescence—'That's just it.'

'Exactly,' resumed the artist. 'Without leisure, without time for anything outside the material things of life, where is your culture? Where is art? Where is romance? Where, in short, is civilisation? And so, as I say, I cannot advise you to stick to the country here. No, one really can't conscientiously advise that, you know.'

A listener might fairly have supposed that I was a young gentleman of means who had sought advice as to the desirability of investing capital in rural New South Wales, and taking up, say, the pastoral life, in preference to a professional career in Sydney. I pinched my knees exultingly; perhaps to demonstrate to myself the fact that all this was no dream. It was I, the orphan, who was carrying on this thrilling conversation with an accomplished man of the world, a distinguished artist. I felt that Mr. Rawlence must clearly be a distinguished artist.

'And so what—what would you advise me to do?' I asked when a pause came. And, immediately, I reproached myself, feeling that I had broken a delightful spell, and risked abruptly ending the most interesting conversation in which I ever took part. The words of my question had so crude a sound. They dragged our talk down to a lower plane, to a plane merely utilitarian, almost squalid by comparison with the roseate heights we had been easily skimming. That was how the sound of my own poor words struck me; but my companion was not so easily dashed. My crudity could not fret his accomplished savoir-faire. (Mr. Rawlence impressed me as the most finished man of the world I had ever met, with the single exception of my father; and, indeed, the Sydney artist did shine brightly beside the sort of people I had lived among of late.)

'Well,' he said, with smiling thoughtfulness, 'I would advise you, when—when the time comes, to make your way to Sydney, and to—to work up a place for yourself there. Of course, there is your native country—England. Who knows? Some day, perhaps— But, meantime, I think Sydney offers better chances than any other place in this country. Yes, I think so. Have you any special leanings? Is there any particular work that you are specially keen on?'

Like a flash the thought passed through my mind: 'What a miserable creature I must be! There's nothing I particularly want to do. If he finds that out, there's an end to any interest in me, of course. Why haven't I thought of this before? What can I say?' And in the same moment, without appreciable pause, I was startled, but agreeably startled, to hear my own voice saying in quite an intelligent way: 'Well, my father wrote, of course; his work was literary work, and—newspapers, you know.'

I can answer for it that I had never till that moment given a single thought to any such notion as a literary career for myself. As well think of a prime minister's career, I should have thought. But, as I well remember, my very accent, intonation, and choice of words had all insensibly changed to fit, as I thought, the taste and habit of my new friend. And I felt it would be an extravagant folly to talk to him as I had talked with Ted, or as I talked with fellow orphans at St. Peter's, of 'pound-er-week-an'-all-found' jobs, or the 'good money' there was 'in carting,' or the fine careers that offered in connection with the construction of new railways. I had often been told you could not beat the job of cooking for a shearers' or a navvies' camp; and that a wideawake boy could earn 'good money' while learning it, as a rouseabout assistant. It seemed to me that there would have been something too absurdly incongruous in attempting to talk of such things to Mr. Rawlence. Hence, perhaps, my audacious suggestion of the literary career. There I might secure his interest. And, sure enough, I did.

'Ah! to be sure, to be sure,' he said, nodding encouragingly. 'Well, with that in view, Sydney is practically the only place, you know. Mind you, I don't say it's easy, or that one could hope to make headway quickly; but gradually, gradually, a fellow could feel his way there, if anywhere in the colony. It is undoubtedly our centre of art and literature, and culture generally. At first you might have to do quite different sort of work; but, while doing it, you know, you could be always on the lookout, always feeling your way to better things. Sydney is, at all events, a capital city, you see. There is society in Sydney, in a metropolitan sense. There is culture. One is continually meeting interesting people who are doing interesting things. It's not Paris or London, you know, but——'

He had a trick of using a radiant smile in place of articulation, by way of finishing a sentence; and I found it more eloquent than any words, and, to me, more subtly flattering. It said so clearly, and more tactfully than words: 'But you follow me, I see; I know you understand me.' And I felt with rare delight that I could and did follow this fascinating man, and understand all his airy allusions to things as far beyond the purview of my present life and prospect as the heavens are beyond the earth, or as Mr. Rawlence was above an 'inmate' of St. Peter's. To a twentieth-century English artist, Mr. Rawlence might have seemed a shade crude, possibly rather pompous and affected, somewhat jejune and trite, perhaps. But our talk took place in the 'seventies of last century, in New South Wales. The Board School was a new invention in England, and in Australia there was quite a lot of bushranging still to come, and the arrival of transported convicts had but recently ceased.

I have not attempted to set down anything like the whole of the talk between the artist and myself; rather, to indicate its quality. Much of it, I dare say, was trivial, and all of it would appear so in written form. Its effect upon me was altogether out of proportion to its real significance, no doubt. It was all new talk to me, but I admit it is not easy now to understand its profoundly stirring and inspiring influence. A casual phrase or two, for example, affected my thoughts for long months afterwards. Mr. Rawlence said:

'There's an accomplishment coming into general use now that might help you enormously: phonography, shorthand-writing, you know. I am told it will mean a revolution in ordinary clerical work, and newspaper work already rests largely on it. The man who can write a hundred words a minute—I think that's about what they manage with it—will command a good post in any office, or on any newspaper, I should think. I should certainly learn shorthand, if I were you. Perhaps you could get them to introduce it here.'

I thought of Sister Agatha, and pictured myself suggesting to her the introduction of shorthand into our curriculum in the Orphanage school. And at the same moment I recalled the occasions, only yesterday, upon which I had had to 'hold out' my hand to this bitterly enthusiastic wielder of the cane. My palms had purple weals on them at that moment, tough though they were from outdoor work. I clenched my hands involuntarily, and was thankful the artist could not see their palms. That would have been a horrid humiliation; the very thought of it made me flush. No, this shorthand would hardly be introduced at St. Peter's; but I would learn it, I thought, all the same; and in due course I did, to find (again in due course) that even the acquisition of this mystery hardly represented quite the infallible key to fame and fortune that Mr. Rawlence thought it in the 'seventies.

But my attitude toward this sufficiently casual suggestion was typical of the immensely stirring and impressive influence which all the artist's talk of that day had upon me. It was undoubtedly most kindly of him to show all the interest he did in one from whom he could not by any stretch of the imagination be said to have anything to gain. We were quite old friends, he said, in his amiable way, by the time evening approached, and we began to pack up his paraphernalia. My crowning triumph came when, in leaving, he gave me his card, and wrote my full name down in his dainty little pocket-book.

'When you do get to Sydney you must come and look me up without fail. My studio is at the address on the card, and I'm generally to be found there. Mind, I shall expect a call as soon as you arrive, and we will talk things over. I'm certain you'll reach Sydney, by and by. Like London, at home, you know, it's the magnet for all the ambitious here. Good-bye, and best of good luck!'

'Mr. Charles Frederick Rawlence, Filson's House, Macquarie Street, Sydney,' was what I read on the card. And then, in very small type in one corner, 'Studio, 3rd Floor.'

I think it had been the most vividly exciting day in my life up till then; and, though still an orphan, and officially an 'inmate,' I walked among the clouds that night; a giant among dwarfs and slaves by my way of it. Youth—aye, the immemorial magic of it was alive in my blood on this spring night, if you like; and not all the Sister Agathas in all the hierarchy of Rome had power to dull the wonder of it!

VI

'If it's to be done at all, why not now? There's nothing to be gained by waiting. I'm only wasting time.'

Phrases of this sort formed the burden of all my thoughts for a number of weeks after my memorable 'day out' (as the servants say) with the Sydney artist. I no longer debated with myself at all the question as to whether or not I should leave the Orphanage. It would have seemed treachery to my new self, and in a way to Mr. Rawlence (my source of inspiration) to debate the point. It was quite certain then that I should take my fate into my own hands, leave St. Peter's, and make an attempt to win my way in the world alone.

Having no belongings, no friends to consult, no possessions of any sort or kind (save Ted's one-pound note, and a neatly bound manuscript volume of bush botany, which latter treasure had been in my pocket on the day of my father's death, and so had remained mine), there really were no preparations for me to make. And so, as I said to myself a score of times a day: 'There's nothing to be gained by waiting.' Still, I waited, some underlying vein of prudence in me, or of cowardice, offering no reason—no reason against the move, no objection, but just negation, the inertia of that which is still. But, yes, I was most certainly going, and soon. That was my last waking thought every night when I dug my head into my straw pillow, and my first waking thought when I swung my feet down to the floor. I was going out into the world to make my own way.

I was too closely engaged by the material aspect of my position to spare thoughts for its abstract quality. But, looking back from the cool greyness of later life, one sees a wistful pathos, and, too, a certain stirring fineness in the situation. And if that is so, how infinitely the pathos and the fineness are enhanced by this thought: Every day in the year, in every country in the world, some lad, somewhere, is gazing out toward life's horizon, just as I was, and telling himself, even as I did, that he must start out upon his individual journey; for him the most important of all the voyages ever undertaken since Adam and Eve set forth from their garden. I suppose it is rarely that a long distance train enters a London terminal but what one such lad steps forth from it, bent upon conquest, and, in how many cases, bound for defeat! Even of Sydney the same thing was and is true, on a numerically smaller scale.

In all lands and in all times the outsetting is essentially the same: the same high hopes and brave determinations; the same profound conviction of uniqueness; the same perfectly true and justifiable inner knowledge that, for the individual, this journey is the most important in all history. In many cases, of course, there are a mother's tears, a father's blessing, and suchlike substitutes for the stirrup-cup. And, withal, in every single case, how absolutely alone the young voyager really is, and must be! For our scientists have not as yet discovered any means of precipitating the experience gleaned in one generation (or a thousand) into the hearts and minds of another generation. Circumstances differ vastly, of course; but the central facts are the same in every case; the traveller must always be alone. The adventure upon which he sets out, be he prince or pauper, university graduate or 'inmate' of St. Peter's, is one which cannot be delegated by him, or taken from him, for it is his own life; his and his alone, to make or to mar, to perfect or to botch, to cherish or to waste, to convert into a fruitful garden, or to relinquish, when his time comes, a sour and derelict plot of barrenness.

And this tremendous undertaking, with all its infinite potentialities of good and evil, joy and agony, pride and despair, is in every country approached by somebody, by some one of our own kind, every single morning, and has been down through the ages since time began, and will be while time lasts. And there are folk who call modern life prosaic, dull, devoid of romance. Romance! Why, in the older lands there is hardly a foot of road space that has not been trodden at one time or another by youth or maid, in the crucial moment of setting out upon this amazing adventure. There are men and women who drum their fingers on a window-pane after breakfast of a morning, and yawn out their disgust at the empty dullness of life, the vacant boredom of another day. And within a mile of them, as like as not, some one is setting forth—lips compressed, brow knit—upon the great adventure. And, too, some one else is face to face with the other great adventure—the laying down of life. Somewhere close to us every single morning brings one or other, or both of these two incomparably romantic happenings.

Truly, to confess ennui, or make complaint of the dullness of life, is to confess to a sort of creeping paralysis of the mind. To be weary is comprehensible enough. Yes, God knows I can understand the existence of weariness or exhaustion. To be bored even is natural enough, if one is bored by, say, forced inaction, or obligatory action of a futile, meaningless kind. But negative boredom; to be uninterested, not because adverse circumstances confine you to this or that barren and uncongenial milieu, but because you see nothing of interest in life as a whole; because life seems to you a dull, empty, or prosaic business—that argues a kind of blindness, a poverty of imagination, which amounts to disease, and, surely, to disease of a most humiliating sort.

But this is digression of a sort I have not hitherto permitted myself in this record. To be precise, I should say, it is digression of a sort which up till now has, when detected, been religiously expunged—sent to feed my fire. Well, one has always pencils; the fire is generally at hand; we shall see. After all, a great deal of one's life is made up of digressions.

VII

In the summer-time there were sharks in Myall Creek, but I had never seen them there in the spring. It was, I think, still somewhere short of midnight when I stepped quietly out of the low window of the room I shared with seven other orphans. (The house was all of one storey.) I would have taken boots, but, excepting on visitors' Sundays, these were kept in a locked cupboard in the sisters' building. My outfit consisted of a comparatively whole pair of trousers—not those immortalised in Mr. Rawlence's sketch—a strong, short-sleeved shirt of hard, grey woollen stuff, a dilapidated waistcoat, a belt, my little book of bush flowers and trees, and my one-pound note. Oh, and an ancient grey felt hat with a large hole in the crown of it. That was all; but I dare say notable careers have been started upon less; in cash, if not in clothing.

Beside the punt I hesitated for a few moments, half inclined to cross by that obvious means, and leave Tim to do the swimming by daylight. Finally, however, I slipped off my clothes, tied them in a bundle on my head, and stepped silently into the water, closely and interestedly observed by one of the Orphanage watch-dogs, chained beside the landing-stage. If he had barked, it would have been only from desire to come with me, in which case, to save trouble, I should probably have become guilty of dog-stealing. The dogs were all good friends of mine.

The water was cold that spring night, but I was soon out of it, and using my shirt for a hard rub down in the scrub beside the creek wharf. As a precaution I had waited for a moonless night, and had made my exit with no more noise than was caused by one of the night birds or little beasts that visited our island. I had seen maps, and knew the compass bearings of the locality. My ultimate destination being Sydney, I turned to the southward, and stepped out briskly along the track leading towards Milton, and away from Werrina.

That was the simple fashion of my outsetting into the world, and for a time I gave literally no thought at all to its real significance. My recognition of it as the beginning of the great adventure of independent life was temporarily obscured by my preoccupation with its detail.

At the end of a silent hour or two, when I suppose half a dozen miles lay between myself and the Orphanage, the reflective faculties came into play again. I began to see my affair more clearly, and to see it whole, or pretty nearly so. From that point onward, I put in quite a good deal of steady thinking with regard to the future. I had two or three definite objects in view, and the first of these was to reach as quickly as possible some point not less than about fifty miles distant from Myall Creek, at which I could feel safe from any likely encounter with a chance traveller from that district.

So much accomplished my plans represented in effect a pedestrian journey to Sydney. But I recognised that the journey might occupy some time, since, in the course of it, I was to earn money and then learn shorthand; the money, by way of working capital and insurance against accidents; the shorthand, to furnish my stock-in-trade and passport in the metropolitan world. So mine was not to be exactly a holiday walking tour. Yet I do not think any one could have set out upon a holiday tour with more of zest than I brought to my tramping. My mood was not of gaiety, rather it was one attuned to high and almost solemn emprise; but, yes, I was full of zest in my walking.

An hour or so before daybreak I lay down on some dead fern at the foot of a huge and sombre red mahogany tree, where the track forked. It was partly that I wanted a rest, and partly that I was uncertain which track led to the township of Milton, where I purposed buying some food before any chance word of my flight from the Orphanage could have travelled so far. The authorities at the Orphanage were little likely to trouble themselves greatly over a runaway orphan; but I cherished a hazy idea that in my case the matter might be somehow a little different, in the same way that I had not been farmed out to any one in the district, possibly because in receiving me St. Peter's had also received some money, certainly more than could be represented by the cost of my maintenance. In any case, I did not want to take any unnecessary risks.

Two minutes after lying down I was asleep. When I waked the sun was clear of the horizon, and I was partly covered over by dead bracken. The dawn hours had been chilly, and evidently I had grappled the fern leaves to me in my sleep, as one tugs a blanket over one's shoulder, without waking, when cold. While I was chuckling to myself over this, and picking the twigs from my clothes, I heard the pistol-like crack of a bullock whip, and then, quite near at hand, the cries of a 'bullocky,' as they called the bullock-drivers thereabout, full of morning-time vehemence.

'Woa, Darkey! Gee, Roan! Baldy, gee! Nigger! Strawberry! Gee, now, Punch! I'll ——y well trim you in a minute, me gentleman. Gee, Baldy; ye ——y cow, you!'

It was thus the unseen bushman discoursed to his cattle, and in a minute or two the horns of his leaders, swaying slightly in their yoke, appeared at the bend of the track, the bolt-heads in the yoke shining like bosses of silver in the slanting rays of the new-risen sun. Clearly the wagon had been loaded overnight, for the huge tallow-wood log slung on it could hardly have been placed in its bed since sun-up.

'I'm your ——y man, if it's Milton you want,' said the driver good-humouredly, in response to my inquiries. 'I'm taking this stick into the Milton saw-mill. ——y solid stick, eh? My oath, yes; there's not enough pipe in that feller to stick a ——y needle in. No, he ought to measure up pretty well, I reckon.' A pause for expectoration, and then: 'Livin' in Milton?'

'No,' I told him, 'just travelling that way.' I flattered myself I had put just the right note of nonchalance into what I knew was a typically familiar sort of phrase. But the bullocky eyed me curiously, all the same, and I instantly made up my mind to part company with him at the earliest convenient moment.

'You travel ——y light, sonny,' he said; 'but I suppose that's the easiest ——y way, when all's said.'

'Yes,' I agreed, with fluent mendacity; 'I got tired of the swag, and I've not very far to go anyway.'

'Ah! Where might ye be makin' for, then?' At this point I realised for the first time the grave disadvantages of redundance in speech, of unnecessary verbiage. There had been no earthly need for my last words, and now that my fatal fluency had found me out, for the life of me I could not think of the name of a likely place. At length, with clumsily affected carelessness, I had to say, 'Oh, just down south a bit from Milton.'

'H'm! Port Lawson way, like?' suggested the curious bullocky.

'Yes, that's it,' I said hurriedly. 'Port Lawson way.'

'Ah, well, I've got a brother works in the ——y saw-mills there. Ye'll maybe know him—Jim Gray; big, slab-sided chap he is, with his nose sorter twisted like, where a ——y brumby colt kicked him when he was a kid. ——y good thing for him it was a brumby, or unshod, anyway; he'd a' bin in Queer Street else, I'm thinkin'. Jever meet him down that way?'

I admitted that I never had, but promised to look out for him.

'Aye, ye might,' said the bullocky. 'An', if ye see him, tell him ye met me—Bill's my name—Bill Gray, ye see—an' tell him— Oh, tell him I said to mind his ——y p's an' q's, ye know, an' be good to his ——y self.'

I readily promised that I would, and our conversation lapsed for a time, while Bill Gray filled his pipe, cutting the tobacco on the ball of his left thumb from a good-sized black plug. For the rest of our walk together, I used extreme circumspection, and was able to confine our desultory exchanges to such safe topics as the bullocks, the weather, the roads, and so forth, all favourite subjects with bushmen. And then, as we drew near the one street of the little township, there was the saw-mill, and my opportunity for bidding good-day to a too inquisitive companion.

'So long, sonny,' said he, in response to my salutation. 'Take care of your ——y self.' (His favourite adjective had long ceased to have any meaning whatever for this good fellow. He now used it even as some ladies use inverted commas, or other commas, in writing. And sometimes, when he had occasion to use a word as long as, say, 'impossible,' he would actually drag in the meaningless expletive as an interpolation between the first and second syllables of the longer word, as though he felt it a sinful waste of opportunities to allow so many good syllables to pass unburdened by a single enunciation of his master word.)

VIII

The freedom of the open road was infinitely delightful to me after the incessant task work of St. Peter's. And perhaps this, quite as much as the policy of getting well away from the Myall Creek district, was responsible for the fact that I held on my way, with never a pause for work of any sort, through a whole week. My lodging at night cost me nothing, of course; and the expenditure of something well under a shilling a day provided a far more generous dietary than that to which St. Peter's had accustomed me. I began to lay on flesh, and to feel strength growing in me.

Mere living, the maintenance of existence, has always been cheap and easy in Australia, where an entirely outdoor life involves no hardship at any season. This fact has no doubt played an important part in the development of the Australian national character. The Australian national character is the English national character of, say, seventy or eighty years ago, subjected to isolation from all foreign influences, and to general conditions much easier and milder than those of England; given unlimited breathing-space, and freed from all pressure of confined population; cut off also, to a very great extent, from the influence of tradition and ancient institutions. For the lover of our British stock and the student of racial problems, I always think that Australia and its people offer a field of unique interest.

I did not come upon Jim Gray, the slab-sided one, in Port Lawson, so was unable to bid him mind his ensanguined p's and q's. Indeed, up to this point, I sternly repressed my social instincts, and refrained, so far as might be, from entering into talk with any one. But after the third day I began to feel that my freedom was assured, and that the chances of meeting any one from the Orphanage neighbourhood were too remote to be worth considering. My tramping became then so much the more enjoyable, for the reason that I chatted with all and sundry who showed sociable inclinations, and at that time this included practically every wayfarer one met in rural Australia. (There has been no great change in this respect.)

'The curse o' this country, my sonny boy,' said one red-bearded traveller whom I met and walked with for some miles, 'is the near-enough system. It's a great country, all right; whips o' room, good land, good climate, an' all the like o' that; but, you mark my words, the curse of it is the "near-enough" system—that an' the booze, o' course; but mainly it's the "near-enough" system, from the nail in your trousers in place of a brace button to the saplin's tied wi' green-hide in place of a gate, an' the bloomin' agitator in parliament in place of a gentleman. It's "near-enough" that crabs us, every time. Look at me! I owned a big store in Kempsey one time. You wouldn't think it to look at me, would ye? Well, an' I didn't booze, either. But it was "near-enough" in the accounts, an' "near-enough" in the buyin', an' "near-enough" in the prices, an'—here I am, barely makin' wages—worse wages than I paid counter hands—cuttin' sleepers. But I get me tucker out of it, an' me bitter 'baccy, an' that; an'—-well, it's "near-enough," an' so I stick at it.'

It was on a Sunday morning of delicious brightness and virginal freshness that I reached the irregularly spreading outskirts of Dursley, a pretty little town in Gloucester county, the appearance of which, as I approached it from the highest point of the long ridge upon whose lower slopes it lay, appealed to me most strongly. Though still small Dursley is an old town, for Australia. The figures against it in the gazetteers are not imposing: 'School of Arts, 1800 vols., etc.—' But, even in the late 'seventies, it possessed that sort of smoothness, that comparative trimness and humanised air of comfort, which only the lapse of years can give. Your new settlement cannot have this attraction, no matter how prosperous or well laid out; and it is a quality which must always appeal especially to the native of an old, much-handled land, such as England. A newcomer from old Gloucester might have thought Dursley raw and new-looking enough, with its galvanised iron roofs and water-tanks, and its painted wooden houses, fences, and verandah posts. But in such a matter my standards had become largely Australian, no doubt. At all events, as I skirted the orchard fence of the most outlying residence of Dursley, I remember saying to myself aloud, as my habit was since I had taken to the road:

'Now this Dursley is the sort of place I'd like to get a job in. I'd like to live here, till——'

'H'm! Outer the mouths o' babes and suckerlings! Tssp! Well, I admire your perspicashon, youngfellermelad, anyhow, an' you can say I said so.'

At the first sound of these words, apparently launched at me from out the Ewigkeit, I spun round on my bare heels in the loamy sand of the track, with a moving picture thought in my mind of little gnomes in pointed caps and leathern jerkins, with diminutive miner's picks in their hands, and a fancy for the occasional bestowal of magical gifts upon wandering mortals. The picture was gone in a second, of course; and I glared at the orchard fence as though that should make it transparent.

'Higher up, sonny! Think of your arboracious ancestors, an' that sorter thing.'

This time my ears gave me truer guidance as to the direction from which the voice came, and, looking up, I saw a man reclining at his ease upon a 'possum-skin rug, which was spread on a sort of platform set between the forked branches of a giant Australian cedar, fully thirty feet from the ground, and higher than the chimneys of the house near by. The man's head and face seemed to me as round and red as any apple, and what I could see of his figure suggested at least a comfortable tendency to stoutness. Whilst not at all the sort of person who would be described as an old man, or even elderly, the owner of the mysterious voice and round, red face had clearly passed that stage at which he would be spoken of by a stranger as a young man.

'He doesn't look a bit like a tree-climber,' I thought. The girth of the great cedar prevented my seeing the species of ladder-stairway which had been built against its far side. I had breakfasted as the sun rose this fine Sunday morning, and walked no more than a couple of miles since, so that the majority of Dursley's inhabitants had probably not begun to think of breakfast yet. My 'arboracious' gentleman, anyhow, was still in his pyjamas, the pattern and colouring of which were, for that period, quite remarkably daring and bright.

'Well, young peripatater, I suppose you're wondering now if I've got a tail, hey? No, sir, I am fundamentally innocent—virginacious, in fact. But, all the same, if you like to just go on peripatating till you get to my side gate, and then come straight along to this arboracious retreat, I will a tale unfold that may appeal greatly to your matutinatal fancy. So peri along, youngfellermelad, an' I'll come down to meet ye.'

'All right, sir, I'll come,' I told him. And those were the first words I spoke to him, though he seemed already to have said a good deal to me.

By this time I had become seized with the idea that here was what is called 'a character.' I had, as it were, caught on to the whimsical oddity of the man, and liked it. Indeed, he would have been a singularly dull dog who failed to recognise this man's quaint good-humour as something jolly and kindly and well-meaning. The gentleman spoke by the aid, not alone of his mouth, but of his small, bright, twinkling eyes, his twitching, almost hairless brows, his hands and shoulders, and his whole, rosy, clean-shaved, multitudinously lined, puckered, and dimpled face. And then his words; the extraordinary manner in which he twisted and juggled with the longer and less familiar of them—arboreal, peripatetic, matutinal, and the like! He had an entirely independent and original way of pronouncing very many words, and of converting certain phrases, such as 'young fellow my lad,' into a single word of many syllables. I never met any one who could so clearly convey hyphens (or dispense with them) by intonation.

Having passed through a small gateway, I skirted the side of a comfortable-looking house of the spreading, bungalow type, with wide verandahs; and so, by way of a shaded path, arrived at the foot of the big cedar, just as the rosy-faced gentleman reached the ground from his stairway.

'Well-timed, young peripatater,' he said, with a chuckling smile. I noticed as he reached the earth that he walked with a peculiar, rolling motion of the body. He certainly was stout. There were no angles about him anywhere, nothing but rotundity. Withal, and despite the curious, rotary gait, there was a suggestion of quickness and of well-balanced lightness about all his movements. His hands and feet I thought quite remarkably small. There was a short section of the bole of a large tree, with a flattened base, lying on the ground near the stairway. The gentleman subsided upon this airily, as though it had been made of eider-down, and, crossing his pyjamed legs, beamed upon me, where I stood before him.

'Peripatacious by habit, what might your name be, youngfellermelad?'

I told him, and he repeated it after me, twice, with a distinct licking of his lips, suggestive of the act of deliberate wine-tasting.

'Good. Yes. Ah! Nicholas Freydon, Nick to his friends, no doubt. Quite a mellifluant name. Nicholas Freydon. Tssp! Very good. You'd hardly think now that my name was George Perkins, would you? Don't seem exactly right, does it?—not Perkins. But that's what it is; and it's a significacious name, too, in Dursley, let me tell you. But that's because of the meaning I've given to it. But for that, it's certainly an unnatural sort of a name for me. Perkins is a name for a thin man, with a pointed nose, no chin, a wisp of hair over his forehead, and an apron. Starch, rice, tapioca: a farinatuous name, of course. But there it is; it happens to be the name of Dursley's Omnigerentual and Omniferacious Agent, you see; and that's me. Tssp! Wharejercomefrom, Nickperry, or Peripatacious Nick?'

The idea of using precautions with or attempting to deceive this rosily rotund 'character' seemed far-fetched and absurd. I not only told him I came from Myall Creek, but also named the Orphanage.

'Ah! I'm an orphantulatory one myself. You absquatulated, I presume; a levantular movement at midnight—ran away, hey?'

I admitted it, and Mr. Perkins nodded in a pleased way, as though discovering an accomplishment in me.

'That's what I did, too; not from an orphanage, but from the paternal roof and shop. My father was a pedestrialatory specialist, a shoemaker, in fact, and brought me up for that profession. But I gave up pedestriality, finding omniferaciousness more in my line. Matter of temperment, of course—inward, like that, with an awl, you know, or outward, like that'—he swung his fat arms wide—'as an omnigerentual man of affairs: an Agent. I'm naturally omnigerentual; my father was awlicular or gimletular—like a centre-bit, y'know. Tssp! So you like Dursley, hey? Little town takes your fancy as you see it from the ridge? Kinduv cuddlesome and umbradewus, isn't it? Yes, I felt that way myself when I came here looking for pedestrial work—repairs a speciality, y' know. Whatsorterjobjerwant?'

I found that Mr. Perkins usually wound up his remarks with a question which, irrespective of its length, was generally made to sound like one word. The habit affected me as the application of a spur affects a well-fed and not unwilling steed. I did not resent it, but it made me jump. On this occasion I explained to the best of my ability that I wanted whatever sort of job I could get, but preferably one that would permit of my doing a little work on my own account of an evening.

'Ha! Applicacious and industrial—bettermentatious ambitions, hey? Quite right. No good sticking to the awlicular if you've anything of the embraceshunist in you.' He embraced his own ample bosom with wide-flung arms, as a London cabman might on a frosty morning. 'Man is naturally multivorous—when he's not a vegetable. Howjerliketerworkferme?'

'Very much indeed,' said I, rising sharply to the spur.

'H'm! Tssp!' It is not easy to convey in writing any adequate idea of this 'Tssp' sound. It seemed to be produced by pressing the tongue against the front teeth, the jaws being closed and the lips parted, and then sharply closing the lips while withdrawing the tongue inward. I am enabled to furnish this minutiae by reason of the fact that I deliberately practised Mr. Perkins's favourite habit before a looking-glass, to see how it was done. This was on the day after our first meeting. The habit was subtly characteristic of the man, because it was so suggestive of gustatory enthusiasm. He was for ever savouring the taste of life and of words, especially of words.

'Well, as it happeneth, Nickperry, your desire for a job is curiously synchronacious with my need of a handy lad. My handy lad stopped being a lad yesterday morning, was married before dinner, and is now away connubialising—honeymoon. After which he goes into partnership with his father-in-law—greens an' fish. It's generally a mistake to make partnerial arrangements with relations, Nickperry—apt to bring about a combustuous staterthings. So I wanterandyladyersee.'

'Yes, sir.'

'My name is Mister Perkins, Nickperry, not "Sir."'

'Yes, Mr. Perkins.'

'That's better. I know you don't mean to be servileacious, but that English "sir" is—we don't like it in Australia, Nickperry. You are from the Old Country, aren't you?'

I admitted it, and marvelled how Mr. Perkins could have known it.

'H'm! Tssp! Fine ol' institootion the Old Country, but cert'nly a bit servileacious. D'jerknowhowtermilkercow?'

'I've been milking four, night and morning, for over two years, s'—Mister Perkins,' I answered, with some pride.

'Good for yez, Nickperry. Whataboutgardening?'

'I worked in the garden every day at the Orphanage, s'—Mister Perkins.'

Mr. Perkins smiled even more broadly than usual. 'It's "Mister" not "Smister" Perkins, Nickperry.'

I smiled, and felt the colour rise in my face. (How I used to curse that girlish blushing habit!)

'Tssp! Well, I see you can take a joke, anyway; an' that's even more important, really, than horticulturous knowledge. Tssp! There's my breakfast bell, an' I'm not dressed. Jus' come along this way, Nickperry.'

In the neatly paved yard at the back of the house stood a well-conditioned cow, of the colour of a new-husked horse chestnut. She was peacefully chewing her cud, oblivious quite to the flight of time. Mr. Perkins ambled swiftly into the house, rolling out again, as it seemed within the second, as though he had bounced against an inner wall, and handing me a milk-pail.

'Stool over there. Jus' milk the cow for me, Nickperry. Seeyagaindreckly!'

And he was gone, having floated within doors, like a huge ball of thistledown on well-oiled castors. Next moment I heard his mellow, rotund voice again, several rooms away.

'Sossidge! Sossidge! Whajerdoin'?' Then a pause. Then—'Keep brekfus' three minutes, Sossidge; I'm not dressed.'

With a mind somewhat confused, I turned to the red cow, and my first task for Mr. Perkins. Bella—I learned subsequently that the cow, when a young heifer, had been given this name by Mr. Perkins, because she distinguished herself by bellowing incessantly for a whole night—proved a singularly amiable beast. I was light-handed, and a fair milker, I believe. Still, my hands were strange to Bella; yet she gave down her milk most generously, and, though standing in the open, without bail or leg-rope, never stirred till the foaming pail was three parts full, and her udder dry. It was something of a revelation to me, for our cows at St. Peter's had been rough scrub cattle, and had been left to pick up their own living for the most part; whereas Bella was aldermanic, a monument of placid satiety.

I very carefully deposited the pail inside the scullery entrance, and withdrew then to a respectful distance, with Bella. Would this amazing Mr. Perkins engage me? There was no doubt in my mind that I hoped he would. I had seen practically nothing of the place, and my impressions of it must all have been produced by the personality of its owner, I suppose. But it did seem to me that this establishment possessed an atmosphere of cheery kindliness and jollity such as I had never before found about any residence. The contrast between this place and St. Peter's was extraordinarily striking. I wondered what Sister Agatha would have made of Mr. Perkins, or he of Sister Agatha. 'Acidulacious' was the word he would have applied to Sister Agatha, I thought, with a boy's readiness in mimicry; and I chuckled happily to myself in the thinking.

IX

While I stood in the yard cogitating, a woman whose white-spotted blue dress was for the most part covered by a very white apron emerged from the scullery door, holding one hand over her eyes to shade them from the morning sun.

'Ha!' she said, in a managing tone; 'so you're the new lad, are you?' I smiled somewhat bashfully, this being a question I was not yet in a position to answer definitely. 'Well, you're to come into breakfast anyhow, and be sure and rub your boots on the— Oh, you haven't any. Well, rub your feet, then. Come on! I must see to my fire.'

So I followed her through the scullery (a spacious and airy place) into the kitchen, having first carefully rubbed the dust off my horny soles on the door-mat. And then, with a boy's ready adaptability in the matter of meals, I gave a good account of myself behind a plate of bacon and eggs, with plentiful bread and butter and tea, though I had broken my fast in the bush an hour or two earlier by polishing off the sketchy remains of the previous night's supper, washed down by water from a bright creek.

Domestic capability was the quality most apparent in my breakfast companion. Her age, I should say, was nearer fifty than forty, but she was exceedingly well-preserved; and she was called, as she explained when we sat down, Mrs. Gabbitas. That in itself, I reflected, probably recommended her warmly to Mr. Perkins. (I guessed in advance that he might refer to the lady as the Gabbitacious one; and he did, more than once, in my hearing.)

'Nick Freydon's your name, I'm told. Oh, well, that's all right then.'

Mrs. Gabbitas always spoke, not alone as one having authority, but, and above all, as one who managed all affairs, things, and people within her reach, as indeed she did to a great extent. A most capable and managing woman was Mrs. Gabbitas. I adopted an air of marked deference towards her, I remember; in part from motives of policy, and partly too because her capability really impressed me. Before the bacon was finished we had become quite friendly. I had learned that my hostess had a full upper set of artificial teeth—quite a distinction in those days—and that on a certain occasion, I forget now at what exact period of her life, she had earned undying fame by being called upon by name, from the pulpit of her chapel, to rise in her place among the congregation and sing as a solo the anthem beginning: 'How beautiful upon the mountains!' I gathered now and later that this remarkable event formed in a sense the pivot upon which Mrs. Gabbitas's career turned. Having spent all her life in Australia, she had not been presented at Court; but, alone, unaccompanied, and from her place among the chapel congregation, she had, in answer to the minister's call, made one service historic by singing 'How beautiful upon the mountains!' It was a pious and pleasant memory, and I admit the story of it did add to her dignity in my eyes. Her false teeth, though admittedly a distinction at that period, did not precisely add to her dignity. They were somehow too mobile, too responsive in front to the forces of gravitation, for a talkative woman.

'Has he given you a name yet?' she asked, as we rose from the table, giving her head a jerk as she spoke in the direction of the little pantry, in which I gathered there was a revolving hatch communicating with the dining-room.

'Well, he called me "Nickperry,"' I said, 'or "Peripatacious Nick."'

'Ah! Yes, that sounds like one of his,' she said, apparently weighing the name and myself, not without approval. 'There's nothing nor nobody he hasn't got some name for. He don't miscall me to me face, for I'd allow no person to do such. But in speakin' to Missis, I've heard him refer to me with some such nonsensical words as "Gabbitular" and "Gabbitaceous," or some such rubbish, although no one wouldn't ever think such a thing of me—nobody but him, that is. But he means no harm, y'know. There's no more vice in the man than—than in Bella there.'

She pointed with a wooden spoon toward the open window, through which we could see the red cow, still contentedly chewing over the memories of her last meal.

'No, there's no harm in him, or you may be sure I wouldn't be here; but he's a great character, is Mr. Perkins; a regler case, he is, an' no mistake. Well, this won't get my kitchen cleaned up—and Sunday morning, too! You might take out that bucket of ashes for me. You'll find the heap where they go down in the little yard behind the stable. There now! That's what comes o' talkin'! If I didden forget to ask a blessin', an' you an orphan, too, I believe! F'what we've received. Lor', make us truly thangful cry-say-carmen—Off you go!'

Her eyes were screwed tightly shut while the words of the gabbled invocation passed her lips, and opened widely as, with its last mysterious syllables, she dropped the wooden spoon she had been holding and turned to her fire. The fire was always 'my' fire to worthy Mrs. Gabbitas. So was the kitchen, for that matter, the scullery, the pantry, and all the things that therein were. Indeed, she frequently spoke of 'my' dining-room table, bedrooms, silver, front hall, windows, and the like. Even the meals served to Mr. and Mrs. Perkins were, until eaten, 'my dining-room breakfast,' 'my dining-room tea,' and so forth.

On my way back from the ash-heap with Mrs. Gabbitas's bucket, I almost collided with Mr. Perkins, as he rolled swiftly and silently into view from round the end of the rustic pergola, between the house yard and the big cedar.

'Aha! The Peripatacious one! Tssp! Yes. Mrs. Perkins wants a word with you, youngfellermelad. Come on this way. She's on the front verandah.'

I found myself involuntarily seeking to emulate Mr. Perkins's remarkable method of locomotion. But I might as well have sought to mimic an albatross or a balloon. It was not only his splendid rotundity which I lacked. The difference went far beyond that. He had oiled castors running on patent ball bearings, and I was but the ordinary pedestrian youth.

We found Mrs. Perkins reclining on a couch on the front verandah, a very gaily coloured dust-rug covering the lower part of her figure. Like many people in Australia she could hardly be classified socially; or, perhaps, I should say she did not possess in any marked form the characteristics which in England are associated with this or that social grade. If there was nothing of the aristocrat about her, it might be said that she was not in the least typically 'middle-class'; and I am sure the severest critic would have hesitated to say that hers were the manners, disposition, or outlook of any 'lower' class. Yet she had married an itinerant cobbler, or at best a 'pedestrialatory specialist,' and, I am sure, without the smallest sense of taking a derogatory step.

Mrs. Perkins was the more a revelation to me perhaps, because, as it happened, Mrs. Gabbitas had said nothing whatever about her. I learned presently that she had not stood upon her feet for more than ten years. I was never told the exact nature of the disease from which she suffered, but I know she had lost permanently the use of her legs, and that she was not allowed to sit up in a chair for more than an hour at a time. She never moved anywhere without her husband. He carried her from one room to another, and at times to different parts of the garden; always very skilfully, and without the slightest appearance of exertion. I think it likely she did not weigh more than six or seven stone. Whenever I saw her carried, there was always draped about her a gaily coloured rug or large shawl; and she was for ever smiling, or actually laughing, or making some quaintly humorous little remark. I wondered sometimes if she had borrowed her playfulness in speech from her husband, or if he had borrowed from her. I do not think I ever met a happier pair.

'So here you are!' she said, as we drew near. Her tone suggested that my coming were the arrival of a very welcome and long-looked-for guest. 'You see, Nick, I am so lazy that I never go to any one; and people are so kind that every one comes to me, sooner or later.'

I experienced a desire to do something graceful and chivalrous, and did nothing, I suspect, but grin awkwardly and shuffle my toes in the dust. It seemed to me clumsy and rude to stand erect before this crippled little lady, yet impossible to adopt any other attitude. Mr. Perkins had subsided, softly as a down cushion, on the edge of the verandah. But he had no angles, and I had no curves. Mr. Perkins removed his hat and caressingly polished that glistening orb, his head, with a large rainbow-hued handkerchief.

'You see, Insect,' he said, beaming upon his wife, 'this young feller, Nickperry, an orphantual lad, as I explained, has taken a fancy to Dursley.'

'And you've taken a fancy to Nickperry, I suppose—as you call him.'

The master waved his fat arms to demonstrate his aloofness from fancies. 'Well, we want a new handy lad,' he said; 'and this peripatacious young chap comes strolling along just as Bella wants milking. The Gabbitual one says he's all right.' This is an elaborate stage aside.

'And how did Bella behave, Nick?' asked the mistress.

'She gave down her milk very nicely—madam,' I said, conscious of a blush over the matter of addressing this little lady.

'Merely a passing weakness for the servileacious, inherited from feudalising ancestors,' said Mr. Perkins in an explanatory tone to his wife. And then to me: 'This is Missis Perkins, Nickperry, not "Madam." When you want to speak to the Missis, you must always come and find her, because she don't get about much, do you, Pig-an'-Whistle?'

One of the points of difference between husband and wife, in their spoken whimsicalities, was that the man had no sense of shame and the wife had. Mr. Perkins was no respecter of persons. He would have addressed his wife as 'Blow-fly,' or 'Sossidge,' or 'Piggins,' or by any of the ridiculous names of the sort that he affected, in the presence of the queen or his own handy lad. I have overheard similar expressions of playful ribaldry upon his wife's lips many a time, but never when I was obviously and officially in their presence.

'And what about pay, Nickperry? How do you stand now on the wages question? What did the Drooper start on, Whizz?' This last question was addressed to Mrs. Perkins, whose real name, as I learned later—never once heard upon her husband's lips—was Isabel.

'Eight shillings,' replied Mrs. Perkins. 'But, of course, wages have risen a good bit since then.'

'Yes, yes; the gas of the agitators does sometimes serve to inflate wages; I'll say that for the beggars. What do you say, Nickperry?'

'Well, si—Mister Perkins——'

'He always calls me "Smister." It's a friendly way they have in England, like the eye-glass and the turned-up trousers.'

In her smile Mrs. Perkins managed to convey merriment, sympathy for me as the person chaffed, and humorous disapproval of her husband. I would gladly have worked for her for nothing, for admiration of her bright eyes.

'I was going to say that I'd be willing to work for whatever you liked, till you saw whether I suited you or not,' I managed to explain.

Mrs. Perkins nodded approvingly, and her husband said: 'That's a very fair offer. You have an engagious way with you, Nickperry; and so we'll engage you at ten bob and all found for a start. How's that, Whizkers?'

The mistress assented pleasantly, and added: 'You'll tell Mrs. Gabbitas to see to the room, George, won't you, and—and to give Nickperry what he needs? She will understand. I dare say he'd like a bath.'

I blushed red-hot at this, but Mrs. Perkins kindly refrained from looking my way, and the interview ended. Then, like a dinghy in the wake of a galleon, I followed my new employer to the rearward parts of the establishment.

X

I used to tell Heron, and others who came into my later life, that the happiest days I ever knew were the 'ten bob a week and all found' days of my handy-lad time. It was very likely true, I think; though really it is next door to impossible for any man to tell which period in his life has been the more happy; and especially is this so in the case of the type of man who finds more interest in the past than in the future. The other side of the road always will be the cleaner, the trees on the far side of the hill will always be the greener, for a great many of us. Any other time seems preferable before the present moment, to some folk; and to many, times past are in every sense superior to anything the future can have to offer.

At all events I was fortunate in the matter of my first situation, and I was contented in it, being satisfied that it was an excellent means to an end which I had decided should be very fine indeed.

I have never yet been able to make up my mind whether I am like or unlike to the majority of mankind in this: with me every phase of life, every occupation, every effort, almost every act and thought have been regarded, not upon their own merits or in relation to themselves, but as means to ends. The ends, it always appeared, would prove eminently desirable; they would give me my reward. The ends, once they were attained, would certainly bring me peace, happiness, fame, health, enjoyment, leisure, monetary gain, or whatever it was they were designed to bring. I am still uncertain whether or not the bulk of my fellow-men are similarly constituted; but I am tolerably certain that one misses a great deal in life as the result of having this kind of a mind.

To a great extent, for example, one misses whatever may be desirable in the one moment of time of which we are all sure—the present. One is not spared the worries and anxieties of the present, because they seem to have their definite bearing upon the end in view. But the good, the sound sweetness of the present, when it chances to be there, so far from cherishing and savouring every fraction of it, we spare it no more than a hurried smile in passing, as a trifling incident of our progress toward the grand end which (just then) we have in view. And how often time proves the end a thing which never actually draws one breath of life; a mere embryo, a phantom, vaporous product of our own imagination! So that for one, two, or fifty years, as the case may be, we have derived no benefit from a number of tangible good things, by reason of our strenuous pursuit of a shadow.

Is this a peculiar disease, or am I merely noting a characteristic of my own which is also a characteristic of the age in which I have lived? I wonder! It is, at all events, a way of living which involves a rather tragical waste of the good red stuff of life; and, yes, upon the whole it is a form of restless waste and extravagance which I fancy is far from rare among the thinking men and women of my time. They do not travel; they hurry from one place to another. They do not enjoy; they pursue enjoyment. They do not rest; they arrange very elaborately, cleverly, strenuously to catch rest—and miss it. Is it not possible that some of us do not live, but use up all the time at our disposal in sweating, toiling, scheming preparation for the particular sort of life we think would suit us; the kind of life we are aiming at; the end, in fact, in pursuit of which we expend and exhaust our whole share of life as a means?

Though these things strike me now, it is needless to say they formed no part of my mental outlook in Dursley.

As is often the case in Australian homes, the colony of out-buildings upon Mr. Perkins's premises at Dursley was more extensive than the parent building. Between the main house and the stable, with all its attendant minor sheds and lean-to, was a long, low-roofed wooden structure, divided into dairy, wash-house, tool-room, workshop, and, at the end farthest from the dairy, what is called a 'man's room.' This latter apartment was now my private sanctuary, entered by nobody else, unless at my invitation. I grew quite fond of this little room, which measured eight feet by twelve feet, and had a window looking down the ridge and across the creek to Dursley in its valley and the wooded hills beyond.

I had no lamp in my sanctuary, and no fireplace. But the climate of New South Wales is kindly, and, when one is used to it and one's eyes are young, the light of a single candle is surprisingly satisfying. That, at all events, was the light by which I mastered the intricacies of Pitman's system of shorthand, besides reading most of the volumes in Dursley's School of Arts library. The reading I accomplished in bed; the shorthand studies on the top of a packing-case which hailed originally from a match factory in east London, and doubtless had contained the curious little cylindrical cardboard boxes of wax vestas, stamped with a sort of tartan plaid pattern, that are seen so far as I know only in Australia, though made in England.

At first, like others who have trodden the same thorny path, I went ahead swimmingly with my shorthand, confining myself to the writing of it on the packing-case. Being at the end of the current bed-book (it was Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt) I took my latest masterpiece of shorthand to bed with me one night, only to find that I could barely read one word in ten. That was a rather perturbed and unhappy night, and my progress thereafter was a somewhat slower and more laborious process.

The habit of rising with the sun was now fairly engrained in me. At about daybreak then my first duties would take me to the wood-heap, with axe and saw, and subsequently to the scullery with a heaped barrow-load of fuel for the day. Arrived there I polished the household's boots and knives, washed my hands at Mrs. Gabbitas's immaculate sink—a more scrupulously clean housewife I have yet to meet—and proceeded to the feeding and milking of Bella. Then I fed the horse, cleared out the stable, spruced myself up, and so to breakfast with 'The Gabbitular One.' Three meat meals and two snacks—'the eleven o'clock' and 'the four o'clock'—were the order of the day in this establishment. The snacks consisted of tea, which was also served at every meal, including dinner, and scones and butter; the meals included always some sort of flesh food and varying adjuncts. After the lean dietary of St. Peter's this regime seemed almost startling to me at first, a thing which could hardly be expected to last. But I adapted myself to it without difficulty or complaint, and thrived upon it greatly.

During the day my main work was the cultivation of the garden, and the care of the front lawn, in which Mr. Perkins took a very special pride and interest; chiefly, I think, because it was the foreground of his wife's daily outlook. But the routine work of the garden, which always was demanding a little more time than one had to spare for it, was subject, of course, to interruptions. I did the churning twice a week, and Mrs. Gabbitas the 'working' and 'making up' of the butter. And there were other matters, including occasional errands to the town—a message for a storekeeper, or a note for the master at his office.

Over the entrance to this office of Mr. Perkins's hung a huge board on which were boldly painted in red letters on a white ground the name of George Perkins, and the impressive words—'Dursley's Omnigerentual and Omniferacious Agent.' It really was a remarkable notice-board, and residents invariably pointed it out to visitors as one of the sights of the town. Indeed, Dursley was very proud of its Omniferacious Agent, who for three successive years now had been also its mayor.

But I gathered from veteran gossips in the town's one street that this had not always been so. Mr. Perkins had originally arrived in the town but very slightly more burdened with worldly gear than I was. The tools of his craft as a cobbler had left room enough in one bundle for the rest of his property. Dursley did not want a cobbler at that time, I gathered; so in this respect Mr. Perkins had been less fortunate than I was; for when I arrived some one had wanted a handy lad. However, what proved more to the point was the fact that the cobbler did want Dursley. He stayed long enough to teach the townsfolk to appreciate him as a cobbler of boots—and of affairs, of threatened legal proceedings, frayed friendships, and the like. And then, for some months prior to a general election, the cobbler edited the local weekly newspaper, and was largely instrumental in returning the Dursley-born candidate to parliament, in place of an interfering upstart from Kempsey way. It was not at all a question of politics, but of Dursley and its interests.

By this time Mr. Perkins had gone some way towards Omniferacious Agenthood. He had very successfully negotiated sundry sales and purchases for townsmen, who shared that disinclination to call in conventionally recognised professional assistance which I have often noticed in rural Australia. Then he married the daughter of the newspaper proprietor, whose brother was one of Dursley's leading storekeepers. Everybody now liked him, except a few crotchety or petty souls, who, not understanding him, suspected him of ridiculing or exposing them in some way, and in any case mistrusted his jollity, his success, and his popularity. Even in the beginning, before the famous notice-board was thought of, and while Mr. Perkins's work was yet 'awlicular,' I gathered that several old residents had set their faces firmly against this invincibly merry fellow, and done all they could to 'keep him in his place.'

And now he bought and sold for them: their houses, land, timber, fruit, produce, live-stock, and property of every sort and kind, making a larger income than most of them in the doing of it, and accomplishing all this purely by force of his personality. He succeeded where others failed, because so few could help liking him; and if he failed but seldom in anything he undertook, that was probably due in part to the fact that he never thought and never spoke of failure, preferring always as topics more cheerful matters. His wife had become a permanent invalid very shortly after their marriage, yet no person could possibly have made the mistake of thinking George Perkins's marriage a failure. I doubt if a happier married pair could have been found in Australia.

The meal we called tea (though we drank tea at every other meal) was partaken of by Mrs. Gabbitas and myself at half-past five, and by Mr. and Mrs. Perkins at six o'clock. I was given to understand at the outset that no work was expected of me after tea. Once or twice of a summer evening I went out into the garden to perform some trifling task I had overlooked, and upon being seen there by Mr. Perkins was saluted with some such remark as:

'Stealing time, Nickperry, stealing time! You an' me'll fall out, my friend, if you can't manage to keep proper working hours. Applicatiousness is all very well, but stealing time after tea is gluttish and greedular, and must be put down with an iron hand, with an iron hand, Nickperry. Tssp! Howzashorthandgetnon?'

Before expelling the last interrogative omnibus word, he would clench one fat fist and knead the air downward with it, to illustrate the process of putting down greediness with an iron hand.

I saw comparatively little of him, of course, owing to his preoccupation with business, his own and that of Dursley and most of its inhabitants; but we were excellent good friends, and it was rarely that he missed his Sunday morning walk round the whole place with me, when my week's work would be passed in more or less humorous review, and the programme for the next week discussed. After this tour of inspection I generally went to church, and the afternoon I almost invariably spent in my room over the packing-case. That is a period which many people give to letter-writing, and it is queer to recall the fact that, so far as I can remember, I had written only two letters in my life up to this period—one to a Sydney bookseller, whose address I got from Mr. Perkins, and one to Mr. Rawlence, the Sydney artist, to tell him of my present position, and to say that I had made a start upon shorthand. His kindly and encouraging reply was, I think, the first letter I ever received through the post. But I now began to write letters by the score, addressed to imaginary correspondents, and based in style upon my studies of correspondence in various books. These epistles, however, all ended their brief careers under the kindling wood in Mrs. Gabbitas's kitchen grate.