rned to me, I thought I
detected the ghost of a smile.

One thing I noticed about him; when he spoke as a madman, he talked like
a man who had been fairly well educated (or sometimes, I fancied, like
a young fellow who was studying to be a school-teacher); his speech was
deliberate and his grammar painfully correct--far more so than I have
made it; but when he spoke as an old bushman, he dropped his g's and
often turned his grammar back to front. But that reminds me that I have
met English college men who did the same thing after being a few years
in the bush; either they dropped their particular way of speaking
because it was mimicked, because they were laughed and chaffed out of
it, or they fell gradually into the habit of talking as rough bushmen
do (they learnt Australian), as clean-mouthed men fall, in spite of
themselves, into the habit of swearing in the heat and hurry and rough
life of a shearing-shed. And, coming back into civilized life, these
men, who had been well brought up, drop into their old manner and
style of speaking as readily as the foulest-mouthed man in a shed
or camp--who, amongst his fellows, cannot say three words without an
oath--can, when he finds himself in a decent home in the woman-and-girl
world, yarn by the hour without letting slip a solitary little damn.

The hatter warmed up the tea-billy again, got out some currant buns,
which he had baked himself in the camp-oven, and we were yarning
comfortably like two old bushmen, and I had almost forgotten that he was
"ratty," when we heard the coach coming. I jumped up to hurry down
to the road. This seemed to shake him up. He gripped my hand hard and
glanced round in his frightened, haunted way. I never saw the eyes of a
man look so hopeless and helpless as his did just then.

"I'm sorry you're going," he said, in a hurried way. "I'm sorry you're
going. But--but they all go. Come again, come again--we'll all be glad
to see you."

I had to hurry off and leave him. "We all," I suppose, meant himself and
his ghosts.

I ran down between the two rows of pines and reached the road just
as the coach came up. I found the publican from Ilford aboard--he was
taking a trip to Sydney. As the coach went on I looked up the clearing
and saw the hatter standing straight behind the fire, with his arms
folded and his face turned in our direction. He looked ghastly in the
firelight, and at that distance his face seemed to have an expression of
listening bl