He'd conclude to walk. I never saw him go anywhere in
particular, but he walked and stood as if he could.

Coming quietly into the room one day, I surprised him sitting at the
table with his arms lying on it and his face resting on them. I heard
something like a sob. He rose hastily, and gathered up some papers which
were on the table; then he turned round, rubbing his forehead and
eyes with his forefinger and thumb, and told me that he suffered
from--something, I forget the name of it, but it was a well-to-do
ailment. His manner seemed a bit jolted and hurried for a minute or so,
and then he was himself again. He told me he was leaving for Melbourne
next day. He left while I was out, and left an envelope downstairs for
me. There was nothing in it except a pound note.

I saw him in Brisbane afterwards, well-dressed, getting out of a cab at
the entrance of one of the leading hotels. But his manner was no more
self-contained and well-to-do than it had been in the old sixpenny
days--because it couldn't be. We had a well-to-do whisky together, and
he talked of things in the abstract. He seemed just as if he'd met me in
the Australia.

"A Rough Shed"

A hot, breathless, blinding sunrise--the sun having appeared suddenly
above the ragged edge of the barren scrub like a great disc of molten
steel. No hint of a morning breeze before it, no sign on earth or sky to
show that it is morning--save the position of the sun.

A clearing in the scrub--bare as though the surface of the earth were
ploughed and harrowed, and dusty as the road. Two oblong huts--one for
the shearers and one for the rouseabouts--in about the centre of the
clearing (as if even the mongrel scrub had shrunk away from them) built
end-to-end, of weatherboards, and roofed with galvanised iron. Little
ventilation; no verandah; no attempt to create, artificially, a breath
of air through the buildings. Unpainted, sordid--hideous. Outside, heaps
of ashes still hot and smoking. Close at hand, "butcher's shop"--a bush
and bag breakwind in the dust, under a couple of sheets of iron, with
offal, grease and clotted blood blackening the surface of the
ground about it. Greasy, stinking sheepskins hanging everywhere with
blood-blotched sides out. Grease inches deep in great black patches
about the fireplace ends of the huts, where wash-up and "boiling" water
is thrown.

Inside, a rough table on supports driven into the black, greasy ground
floor, and formed of