of the verandah, and, receiving
none, save the crackle of the sheets of iron in the roof, pointed with
his pipe-stem in the direction of the sounds from the township.

"That!" he exclaimed. "There it is--energy--go--good Anglo-Saxon go.
That's what makes us what we are. Here's the bush asleep. If there's any
niggers in it, they're asleep. Even the lizards are asleep. The trees
stop growing, and won't even make a shade; but us--do we stop? No! There
ain't nothin' that'll stop us. We didn't make the world altogether
maybe, but, by smoke, we're making it fit for our needs. Who'd work this
hot spell except us? Who'd run this country except us? Here's Australia;
there's Africa; there's America; there's India; and there's "home;" and
who runs the lot if it ain't us? And what's the world outside of that
lot? A few paddocks full of dargoes and black-fellows ready to cut each
other's throats if it wasn't for us."

He put his pipe once more between his lips, and sat thinking in silence.
The buzz-saw whirred and jarred; the hammers clanged and jangled; the
school-children droned and hummed; and beyond Marmot saw in his fancy
the selections whence they came to school. Always the same picture,
inasmuch that in each there was work. Here a man was working with his
hoe in his pumpkin patch; there another cared for his maize; a third was
splitting shingles for the roof of a shed he was building; a fourth was
splitting logs with a heavy maul and wedge for fencing rails; a fifth
was fixing water-tanks to be ready when the rain came; while a sixth was
digging a waterhole in the hard, baked earth also to be ready for the
rain. On every selection, as it came into Marmot's mind, there was work
going on--work that made the tanned skins of the workers glisten with
the beads of sweat; work that made moving pictures against a background
of nature at rest. Inside the selection houses the women did their
share, and sometimes outside as well. Beyond the houses and the
selections, in the gullies of the ranges, men worked as they sought for
mineral wealth when the sun was high, as well as when it was low; on the
big paddocks of the station the bush slept, and the flocks and herds
huddled wherever shelter could be found, but the men were never still,
not even in the station homesteads. Everywhere that the mind of Marmot
wandered, every scene that came to him as he sat and mused, showed
white men, the men of the Anglo-Saxon blood, tireless, restless,