s to say they formed
no part of my mental outlook in Dursley.

As is often the case in Australian homes, the colony of out-buildings
upon Mr. Perkins's premises at Dursley was more extensive than the
parent building. Between the main house and the stable, with all its
attendant minor sheds and lean-to, was a long, low-roofed wooden
structure, divided into dairy, wash-house, tool-room, workshop, and,
at the end farthest from the dairy, what is called a 'man's room.'
This latter apartment was now my private sanctuary, entered by nobody
else, unless at my invitation. I grew quite fond of this little room,
which measured eight feet by twelve feet, and had a window looking
down the ridge and across the creek to Dursley in its valley and the
wooded hills beyond.

I had no lamp in my sanctuary, and no fireplace. But the climate of
New South Wales is kindly, and, when one is used to it and one's eyes
are young, the light of a single candle is surprisingly satisfying.
That, at all events, was the light by which I mastered the intricacies
of Pitman's system of shorthand, besides reading most of the volumes
in Dursley's School of Arts library. The reading I accomplished in
bed; the shorthand studies on the top of a packing-case which hailed
originally from a match factory in east London, and doubtless had
contained the curious little cylindrical cardboard boxes of wax
vestas, stamped with a sort of tartan plaid pattern, that are seen so
far as I know only in Australia, though made in England.

At first, like others who have trodden the same thorny path, I went
ahead swimmingly with my shorthand, confining myself to the writing of
it on the packing-case. Being at the end of the current bed-book (it
was Charles Reade's _Griffith Gaunt_) I took my latest masterpiece of
shorthand to bed with me one night, only to find that I could barely
read one word in ten. That was a rather perturbed and unhappy night,
and my progress thereafter was a somewhat slower and more laborious
process.

The habit of rising with the sun was now fairly engrained in me. At
about daybreak then my first duties would take me to the wood-heap,
with axe and saw, and subsequently to the scullery with a heaped
barrow-load of fuel for the day. Arrived there I polished the
household's boots and knives, washed my hands at Mrs. Gabbitas's
immaculate sink--a more scrupulously clean housewife I have yet to
meet--and proceeded to the feeding and milking of Bella. Then