e times when I wished I could fall back with all the
experience I'd got, and sit once more in the little slab-and-bark
"chapel" on Ross's Creek and hear Peter M'Laughlan and the poor,
struggling selectors sing "Shall We Gather at the River?" and then go
out and start life afresh.

My old school chum and bush mate, Jack Barnes, had married pretty little
Clara Southwick, who used to play the portable harmonium in chapel. I
nearly broke my heart when they were married, but then I was a young
fool. Clara was a year or so older than I, and I could never get away
from a boyish feeling of reverence for her, as if she were something
above and out of my world. And so, while I was worshipping her in chapel
once a month, and at picnics and parties in between, and always at a
distance, Jack used to ride up to Southwick's place on Saturday and
Sunday afternoons, and on other days, and hang his horse up outside, or
turn it in the paddock, and argue with old Southwick, and agree with the
old woman, and court Clara on the sly. And he got her.

It was at their wedding that I first got the worse for drink.

Jack was a blue-eyed, curly black-haired, careless, popular young scamp;
as good-hearted as he was careless. He could ride like a circus monkey,
do all kinds of bush work, add two columns of figures at once, and write
like copper-plate.

Jack was given to drinking, gambling and roving. He steadied up when he
got married and started on a small selection of his own; but within the
year Clara was living in a back skillion of her father's house and Jack
was up-country shearing. He was "ringer" of the shed at Piora Station
one season and made a decent cheque; and within a fortnight after the
shed "cut out" he turned up at home in a very bad state from drink and
with about thirty shillings in his pockets. He had fallen from his horse
in the creek near Southwick's, and altogether he was a nice sort of
young husband to go home to poor, heart-broken Clara.

I remember that time well. She stopped me one day as I was riding past
to ask me if I'd seen Jack, and I got off my horse. Her chin and mouth
began to twitch and tremble and I saw her eyes filling with tears. She
laid her hand on my arm and asked me to promise not to drink with Jack
if I met him, but to try and persuade him to come home. And--well, have
you, as a man, ever, with the one woman that you can't have, and no
matter at what time or place, felt a sudden mad longing to take her