e but what the germ of it began to
stir a little in its husk even at St. Peter's Orphanage; I feel sure
it did while I browsed upon English fiction in my little wooden room
beside the tool-shed at Dursley. It was near the surface from the time
I began to visit Mr. Rawlence's studio in Macquarie Street, and busily
developing from that time onward, though it did not become a visible
and admitted growth, with features and a shape of its own, until more
than two years had elapsed. Then, quite suddenly, I recognised it, and
told myself it was for this really that I had been 'saving up.'

In the Old World the adventurous-minded, enterprising youth turns
naturally from contemplation of the humdrum security of the
multitudinously trodden path in which he finds himself to thoughts of
the large new lands; of those comparatively untried and certainly
uncrowded uplands of the world, which, apart from the other chances
and attractions they offer, possess the advantage of lying oversea,
from the beaten track--over the hills and far away. 'Here,' he may be
supposed to feel, as he gazes about him in his familiar, Old World
environment, 'there is nothing but what has been tried and exploited,
sifted through and through time and again, all adown the centuries.
What chance is there for me among the crowd, where there is nothing
new, nothing untried? Whereas, out there--' Ah, the magic of those
words, 'Out there!' and 'Over there!' for home-bred youth! It is good,
wholesome magic, too, and it will be a bad day for the Old World, a
disastrous day for England, when it ceases to exercise its powers upon
the hearts and imaginations of the youth of our stock.

Well, and in the New World, in the case of such sprawling young giants
among the nations of the future as Australia, what is the master dream
of adventurous and enterprising youth there? Australia, like Canada,
has its call of the west and the north, with their appealing tale of
untried potentialities. Canada has also, across its merely figurative
and political southern border, a vast and teeming world, reaching down
to the equator, and comprising almost every possible diversity of
human effort and natural resource. Australia, the purely British
island continent, is more isolated. But, broadly speaking, the very
facts which make the enterprising Old World youth fix his gaze upon
the New World cause the same type of youth in Australia, for example,
to look home-along across the seas, towa