b. She was dying of dropsy and couldn't move from
her chair. She showed me a portrait of herself as I remembered her, and
talked quite seriously about going on the stage again.

"Now, our home is about two thousand miles wide, and the world's our
stage. If the worst comes to the worst we can always get tucker and wood
and water for nothing. If we're camping at a job in a tent there's no
house-cleaning to bother us. All we've got to do when the camp gets too
dirty is to shift the tent to a fresh place. We've got time to think
and--we're free.

"But then, agen," he reflected, "there's the world's point of view to
be considered. Some day I might be flashing past in a buggy or
saloon-carriage--or, the chances are it will be you--and you might look
out the window and see an old swaggy tramping along in the dust, or
camped under a strip of calico in the rain in the scrub. (And it might
be me--old Mitchell--that really wrote your books, only the world won't
know it.) And then you'll realize what a wretched, miserable life
it was. We never realize the miseries of life till we look back--the
mistakes and miseries that had to be and couldn't be helped. It's all
luck--luck and chance."

But those girls seemed to have gravelled Mitchell, and he didn't seem
able to talk himself round. He tramped on, brooding for a while, and
then suddenly he said:

"Look here, Harry! Those girls are giving a dance to-night, and if I
liked to go back to Bourke and tog up and go to the dance I could pick
out the prettiest, dance with her all the evening, and take her for
a stroll afterwards, old tramp as they thought me. I've lived--but it
wouldn't be worth my while now."

I'd seen Jack in a mood like this before, and thought it best to say
nothing. Perhaps the terrible heat had affected him a little. We walked
on in silence until we came to the next billabong. "Best boil the
billy here, Harry," said Mitchell, "and have some tea before we go any
further."

I got some sticks together and made a fire and put the billy on. The
country looked wretched--like the ghost of a burnt-out land--in the
moonlight. The banks of the creek were like ashes, the thin, gnarled
gum-bush seemed dry-rotting fast, and in many places the surface of the
ground was cracked in squares where it had shrunk in the drought. In the
bed of the creek was a narrow gutter of water that looked like bad milk.

Mitchell sat on his swag, with his pint of tea on the ground by his
fo