According to his temperament a man's memory of travel and the strange
wild places of the earth deals chiefly with one set of reminiscences or
with another. For me the remembered mornings of the wide and lonely
world, whether in the bush, or on the prairie, or the veldt, or at sea,
are my chiefest delight. For in them, as in the morning even now, is
something especial and peculiar which recalls and recreates youth: which
breaks up the dead customs of to-day, and sends one back again to the
swift, sweet hours of experiment and change. Assuredly the nights had
their charm, whether they were spent by some great camp-fire on the
winding Lachlan, in the darkness of a pine forest in British Columbia,
or on the fo'c'sle-head of a ship upon the sea; and yet the night was
the night, the prelude to sleep, and not to activity, the chief joy of
man.

I can recall how a morning broke for me once which was the morning of a
kind of freedom almost appalling to the child of cities. This was the
morning of youth, or rather of earliest manhood, when I was timid and
yet unafraid, curious, and, after a manner, innocent, when I had slept
by my first camp-fire, on the Bull Plains of Australia's Riverina. And
yet I can remember nothing of those hours clearly. Rather is there in my
mind as typical of the Australian dawn such hours as those I spent away
beyond the Murray, the Murrumbidgee and the Lachlan, on a station on the
banks of the Willandra Billabong. It was early summer and shearing time
for a hundred thousand sheep, whose fleeces were destined for Lyons and
the North of England. I had dropped off a wearied horse close upon
midnight, and yet by half-past three I was up once more. I stumbled
sleepily in the starry darkness to the mare that was kept up, one
Beeswing by name, a mare so swift and keen for a little while that to
ride her was a delight. She whinnied and muzzled me all over as I put
the saddle on her and drew the girths tight. Then I swung across her,
and for some minutes she went gingerly, for she was unsound and wanted
warming for the hot task before her. Yet it was her only work in the
long day and she delighted in it even as I did. We picked our way across
the shadows of big salt-bush and the rounded humps of cotton-bush, then
brown and leafless, to the paddock, a mile square, where the other
horses were at pasture, and as I rode sleep dropped away from me and my
eyes opened and my lips grew moist as I sucked in the air of