elics for a large book of Boer War pictures,
whose leaves they turned together, while the old gramophone ran
unfalteringly onwards through its extensive repertoire.

"Those times must have been great," said Charley.

"Don't those chaps look as if they're enjoying themselves?"

"Not half. Cripes! I wish I had been there."

"Why in the devil didn't that bloomin' war come in our time?"

* * * * *

"Not our luck. You know, Mac, if we'd been the same age we're now,
we'd have been there."

Another month passed on that station, and the two stockmen, alone on
their beats, rode day after day across the wild ranges and down in the
ravines. Along the whole of the east ran a range of mountains, more
than a hundred miles of them, their lower slopes clothed in heavy bush,
and their serrated summits deep in winter snow. Standing in the north,
grand and solitary, was the massive blue-white shape of old Ruapehu,
his fires quenched these many years, and, near him, the active cone of
Ngaruahoe, whose angry, ominous smoke-clouds rained ashes sometimes on
the surrounding country, but more often his wisp of yellowy-white smoke
trailed lazily to leeward, or mounted heavenwards in cumulous shape.
Occasionally, on his rounds, Mac dismounted on the summit of a ridge,
threw the rein over a stump and settled down for a smoke, his back
against a log, his dogs at his feet, a wild ravine below him, then
ridge after ridge, bush-topped or strewn with charred trunks and
rotting stumps, and, away beyond, the two great snow volcanoes. They
were his friends, and, of all times, he loved most these moments spent
in contemplation of those grim reminders of the strength of Nature, of
the untamed fires which burnt beneath and of the smallness of man. He
revelled in the changing colour tones of the rugged ice cliffs, of the
mountain mists and of the rolling deliberate smoke-cloud. Grand, too,
was the space of it all, wonderful the air, and here, high on this
ridge, human selfishness scarce seemed to be of this world. Sometimes,
when he had been out here ready to start mustering at dawn, he had
watched the first glow of coming daylight on the summit of Ruapehu, and
again, at the end of a long summer day when the smoke of many
bush-fires was in the air, he had watched for an hour or more the
delicate lilacs, the greens and blues, reds and golds, the shadows
deepening beneath the buttresses, and the slow melting of the last