r these districts for nearly a year, with only a
shower now and again, which was a mockery--scarcely darkening the baked
ground. Wheat crops came up a few inches and were parched by the sun or
mown for hay, or the cattle turned on them; and last year there had been
rust and smut in the wheat. And, on top of it all, the dreadful cattle
plague, pleuro-pneumonia, had somehow been introduced into the district.
One big farmer had lost fifty milkers in a week.

Peter M'Laughlan didn't preach much of hope in this world; how could
he? There were men there who had slaved for twenty, thirty, forty years;
worked as farmers have to work in few other lands--first to clear the
stubborn bush from the barren soil, then to fence the ground, and manure
it, and force crops from it--and for what? There was Cox, the farmer,
starved off his selection after thirty years and going out back with his
drays to work at tank-sinking for a squatter. There was his eldest
son going shearing or droving--anything he could get to do--a
stoop-shouldered, young-old man of thirty. And behind them, in the end,
would be a dusty patch in the scrub, a fencepost here and there, and a
pile of chimney-stones and a hardwood slab or two where the but was--for
thirty hard years of the father's life and twenty of the son's.

I forget Peter's text, if he had a text; but the gist of his sermon
was that there was a God--there was a heaven! And there were men there
listening who needed to believe these things. There was old Ross from
across the creek, old, but not sixty, a hard man. Only last week he had
broken down and fallen on his knees on the baked sods in the middle of
his ploughed ground and prayed for rain. His frightened boys had taken
him home, and later on, the same afternoon, when they brought news of
four more cows down with "the pleuro" in an outer paddock, he had stood
up outside his own door and shaken his fist at the brassy sky and cursed
high heaven to the terror of his family, till his brave, sun-browned
wife dragged him inside and soothed him. And Peter M'Laughlan knew all
about this.

Ross's family had the doctor out to him, and persuaded him to come to
church this Sunday. The old man sat on the front seat, stooping forward,
with his elbow resting on the desk and his chin on his hand, bunching up
his beard over his mouth with his fingers and staring gloomily at Peter
with dark, piercing eyes from under bushy eyebrows, just as I've since
seen a Scotch