k that God will hear us when He does not hear _that_?" asked
Peter.

The parson stared at him for a moment and then got into his buggy and
drove away, greatly shocked and deeply offended. But, later on, over tea
at the homestead, he said that he felt sure that that "unfortunate
man," Peter M'Laughlan, was not in his right mind; that his wandering,
irregular life, or the heat, must have affected him.

I well remember the day when I first heard Peter M'Laughlan preach. I
was about seventeen then. We used sometimes to attend service held
on Sunday afternoon, about once a month, in a little slab-and-bark
school-house in the scrub off the main road, three miles or so from
our selection, in a barren hole amongst the western ridges of the Great
Dividing Range. School was held in this hut for a few weeks or a few
months now and again, when a teacher could be got to stay there
and teach, and cook for himself, for a pound a week, more or less
contributed by the parents. A parson from the farming town to the east,
or the pastoral town over the ridges to the west, used to come in his
buggy when it didn't rain and wasn't too hot to hold the service.

I remember this Sunday. It was a blazing hot day towards the end of a
long and fearful drought which ruined many round there. The parson
was expected, and a good few had come to "chapel" in spring-carts, on
horseback, and on foot; farmers and their wives and sons and daughters.
The children had been brought here to Sunday-school, taught by some
of the girls, in the morning. I can see it all now quite plain: The
one-roomed hut, for it was no more, with the stunted blue-grey gum,
scrub all round. The white, dusty road, so hot that you could cook eggs
in the dust. The horses tied up, across the road, in the supposed shade
under clumps of scraggy saplings along by the fence of a cattle-run.
The little crowd outside the hut: selectors in washed and mended tweeds,
some with paper collars, some wearing starched and ironed white coats,
and in blucher boots, greased or blackened, or the young men wearing
"larstins" (elastic-side boots). The women and girls in prints and
cottons (or cheap "alpaca," etc.), and a bright bit of ribbon here and
there amongst the girls. The white heat blazed everywhere, and "dazzled"
across light-coloured surfaces--dead white trees, fence-posts, and
sand-heaps, like an endless swarm of bees passing in the sun's glare.
And over above the dry boxscrub-covered ridges,