ieve that Johnson was a coward in that direction; I believe
that he trusted his wife implicitly, or rather that he never dreamed
of such a thing--as is the way with most married men. Sentiment is
selfishness, perhaps, but we won't argue that, such arguments come to
nothing.

I heard from a fellow-passenger of Johnson's that he had "a hell of a
voyage" because of his young wife's ignorant selfishness and his own
sensitiveness; he bribed stewards for better food and accommodation for
his wife and children, paid the stewardess to help with the children,
got neither rest, nor peace, nor thanks for himself, and landed in
Sydney a nervous wreck, with five pounds out of the ten he started with.

Johnson was a carpenter. He got work from a firm of contractors in
Sydney, who, after giving him a fortnight's trial, sent him up-country
to work on the railway station buildings, at the little pastoral mining
and farming town of Solong. The railway having come to Solong, things
were busy in the building line, and Johnson settled there.

Johnson was thin when he came to Solong; he had landed a living
skeleton, he said, but he filled out later on. The democratic atmosphere
soothed his mind and he soon loved the place for its unconventional
hospitality. He worked hard and seemed to have plenty of energy--he said
he got it in Australia. He said that another year of the struggle in
London would have driven him mad. He fished in the river on Saturday
afternoons and Sundays, and, perhaps for the first month or so, he
thought that he had found peace. Johnson's wife was a rather stout,
unsympathetic-looking young woman, with the knit of obstinacy in her
forehead; she had that stamp of "hardness" on her face which is the rule
amongst English and the exception amongst Australian women. We of Solong
thought her hard, selfish and narrow-minded, and paltry; later on we
thought she was a "bit touched;" but local people often think that of
strangers.

By her voice and her habit of whining she should have been a thin,
sharp-faced, untidy, draggled-tailed woman in a back street in London,
or a worn-out selector's wife in the bush. She whined about the climate.
"It will kill the children! It will kill the children! We'll never rear
them here!" She whined about the "wretched hole in the bush" that her
husband had brought her to; and to the women whom she condescended to
visit--because a woman must have a woman to talk to--she exaggerated
the miseries