upposed to be a Scotchman from London, and some said
that he had got into trouble in his young days and had had to clear out
of the old country; or, at least, that he had been a ne'e-er-do-well and
had been sent out to Australia on the remittance system. Some said he'd
studied for the law, some said he'd studied for a doctor, while others
believed that he was, or had been, an ordained minister. I remember one
man who swore (when he was drinking) that he had known Peter M'Laughlan
as a medical student in a big London hospital, and that he had started
in practice for himself somewhere near Gray's Inn Road in London.
Anyway, as I got to know him he struck me as being a man who had looked
into the eyes of so much misery in his life that some of it had got into
his own.

He was a tall man, straight and well built, and about forty or
forty-five, when I first saw him. He had wavy dark hair, and a close,
curly beard. I once heard a woman say that he had a beard like you see
in some Bible pictures of Christ. Peter M'Laughlan seldom smiled; there
was something in his big dark brown eyes that was scarcely misery, nor
yet sadness--a sort of haunted sympathy.

He must have had money, or else he got remittances from home, for he
paid his way and helped many a poor devil. They said that he gave away
most of his money. Sometimes he worked for a while himself as bookkeeper
at a shearing-shed, wool-sorter, shearer, even rouseabout; he'd work
at anything a bushman could get to do. Then he'd go out back to
God-forgotten districts and preach to bushmen in one place, and get a
few children together in another and teach them to read. He could take
his drink, and swear a little when he thought it necessary. On one
occasion, at a rough shearing-shed, he called his beloved brethren
"damned fools" for drinking their cheques.

Towards the end of his life if he went into a "rough" shed or shanty
west of the Darling River--and some of them _were_ rough--there would be
a rest in the language and drinking, even a fight would be interrupted,
and there would be more than one who would lift their hats to Peter
M'Laughlan. A bushman very rarely lifts his hat to a man, yet the
worst characters of the West have listened bareheaded to Peter when he
preached.

It was said in our district that Peter only needed to hint to the
squatter that he wanted fifty or a hundred pounds to help someone or
something, and the squatter would give it to him without questi