g against
its locked door, broke the truth to one and all.

The Villain-Worshipper

There was no more fervent admirer of Stingaree and all bushrangers than
George Oswald Abernethy Melvin. Despite this mellifluous nomenclature
young Melvin helped his mother to sell dance-music, ballads, melodeons,
and a very occasional pianoforte, in one of the several self-styled
capitals of Riverina; and despite both facts the mother was a lady of
most gentle blood. The son could either teach or tune the piano with a
certain crude and idle skill. He endured a monopoly of what little
business the locality provided in this line, and sat superior on the
music-stool at all the dances. He had once sung tenor in Bishop
Methuen's choir, but, offended by a word of wise and kindly advice, was
seen no more in surplice or in church. It will be perceived that Oswald
Melvin had all the aggressive independence of Young Australia without
the virility which leavens the truer type.

Yet he was neither a base nor an unkind lad. His bane was a morbid
temperament, which he could no more help than his sallow face and weedy
person; even his vanity was directly traceable to the early influence of
an eccentric and feckless father with experimental ideas on the
upbringing of a child. It was a pity that brilliantly unsuccessful man
had not lived to see the result of his sedulous empiricism. His wife was
left to bear the brunt--a brave exile whose romantic history was never
likely to escape her continent lips. None even knew whether she saw any
or one of those aggravated faults of an only child which were so
apparent to all her world.

And yet the worst of Oswald Melvin was known only to his own morbid and
sensitive heart. An unimpressive presence in real life, on his mind's
stage he was ever in the limelight with a good line on his lips. Not
that he was invariably the hero of these pieces. He could see himself as
large with the noose round his neck as in coronet or halo; and though
this inward and spiritual temper may be far from rare, there had been no
one to kick out of him its outward and visible expression. Oswald had
never learned to gulp down the little lie which insures a flattering
attention; his clever father had even encouraged it in him as the
nucleus of imagination. Imagination he certainly had, but it fed on
strong meat for an unhealthy mind; it fattened on the sordid history of
the earlier bushrangers; its favorite fare was the charact