omesick himself. No doubt it was the misery of his domestic life in
Australia that made him so.

Towards the end of the third or fourth year Johnson threw up a couple of
contracts he had on hand, sacrificed a piece of land which he had bought
and on which he had built a cottage in the short time he had been in
Solong, and, one lovely day in June, when the skies were their fairest,
the hills their bluest, the river its widest and clearest, and the grass
was waving waist high after rain--one blue and green and golden day the
Johnsons left Solong, with the trunks they had brought out with them,
for Sydney, _en route_ for smoky London.

Mrs Johnson was a woman transformed--she was happy and looked it. The
last few weeks she had seemed in every way the opposite of the woman we
had known: cheerful, kind to neighbours in sickness and trouble,
even generous; she made many small presents in the way of mantelshelf
ornaments, pictures, and house-linen. But then it was Johnson who had to
pay for that in the end.

He looked worn and worried at the railway station--more like himself
as he was when he first came to Solong--and as the train moved off I
thought he looked--well, frightened.

That must have been nearly twenty years ago.

London last winter. It was one of those days when London's lurid sun
shows up for a little while like a smoky danger signal. The snow had
melted from the house-tops and the streets were as London streets are
after the first fall of snow of the season. But I could stand the flat
no longer, I had to go out and walk. I was sun-sick--I was heart-sick
for the sun, for the sunny South--for grassy plains, blue mountains,
sweeps of mountain bush and sunny ocean beaches. I walked hard; I walked
till I was mud-splashed to the shoulders; I walked through the squalid,
maddening sameness of miles of dingy, grimy-walled blocks and rows of
four-storied houses till I felt smothered--jailed, hopelessly. "Best
get home and in, and draw the blinds on it," I said, "or my brain will
turn."

I was about to ask a policeman where I was when I saw, by the name on
a corner of the buildings, that I was in City Road, North. All the
willow-fringed rivers and the sunny hills of Solong flashed before me at
the sight of the name of that street. I had not been able to recall the
name of the street off City Road in which the Johnsons lived, though
I had heard it often enough in the old days from the tongue of Mrs
Johnson.

I fe