of tobacco with a stranger met on the
road. His faults she knew as well: his drunkenness often, his looseness
of living, his excitability, all born of unnatural surroundings; but his
virtues she knew as well, none better, and all her craving for the scent
of the gums and to feel again the swaying saddle and to hear again the
fathomless noon-day silence and to see again the stock rushing in
jumbling haste for the water-hole, went out in a tempestuous sympathy for
those who struggled for the union in the bush. And Ned! She hardly knew
what she thought about Ned.

She was unjust in her thoughts, she knew, not altogether unjust but
somewhat. There had been heroism in the passive struggle of six months
before, when the seamen left the boats at the wharves for the sake of
others and when the "lumpers" threw their coats over their shoulders and
stood by the seamen and when the miners came up from the mines so that no
coal should go to help fight comrades they had never seen. Her heart had
thrilled with joy to see so many grip hands and stand together, officers
and stewards and gasmen and lightermen and engine-drivers and cooks and
draymen, from Adelaide to far-off Cooktown, in every port, great and
small, all round the eastern coast. As the strike dragged on she lived
herself as she had lived in the starving hand-to-mouth days of her bitter
poverty, to help find bread for the hungry families she knew. For
Phillips and Macanany were on strike, while Hobbs, who had moved round
the corner, had been sacked for refusing to work on the wharves; and many
another in the narrow street and the other narrow streets about it were
idling and hungering and waiting doggedly to see what might happen, with
strike pay falling steadily till there was hardly any strike pay at all.
And Nellie's heart, that had thrilled with joy when New Unionism uprose
in its strength and drew the line hard and fast between the Labour that
toiled and the Capitalism that reaped Labour's gains, ached with mingled
pride and pain to see how hunger itself could not shake the stolid
unionism about her. She saw, too, the seed that for years had been sown
by unseen, unknown sowers springing up on every hand and heard at every
street corner and from every unionist mouth that everything belonged of
right to those who worked and that the idle rich were thieves and
robbers. She smiled grimly to watch Mrs. Macanany and viragoes like her
pouring oil on the flames and drumming th