n the kitchen-table, put
up the only two pictures they possessed, Ned and Jerry giving opinions
on the straightness of her eye, from below: a fancy picture of the
Battle of Waterloo in the parlour; a print of "Harvey Discovering the
Circulation of the Blood" on the surgery wall.

From where he sat Mahony could hear the voices of the children--John's
children--at play. They frolicked with Pompey in the yard. He could
endure them, now that he was not for ever tumbling over them. Yes, one
and all were comfortably established under the new roof--with the
exception of poor Palmerston the cat. Palmerston had declined to
recognise the change, and with the immoderate homing-instinct of his
kind had returned night after night to his old haunts. For some time
Mahony's regular evening walk was back to the store--a road he would
otherwise not have taken; for it was odious to him to see Polly's neat
little appointments going to rack and ruin, under the tenancy of a
dirty Irish family. There he would find the animal sitting, in
melancholy retrospect. Again and again he picked him up and carried him
home; till that night when no puss came to his call, and Palmerston,
the black and glossy, was seen no more: either he had fallen down a
shaft, or been mangled by a dog, or stolen, cats still fetching a high
price on Ballarat.

The window of Mahony's room faced a wide view: not a fence, hardly a
bit of scrub or a tuft of grass-tree marked the bare expanse of uneven
ground, now baked brown as a piecrust by the December sun. He looked
across it to the cemetery. This was still wild and unfenced--just a
patch of rising ground where it was permissible to bury the dead. Only
the day before--the second anniversary of the Eureka Stockade--he had
watched some two to three hundred men, with crepe on their hats and
sleeves, a black-draped pole at their head, march there to do homage to
their fallen comrades. The dust raised by the shuffling of these many
feet had accompanied the procession like a moving cloud; had lingered
in its rear like the smoke from a fire. Drays and lorries crawled for
ever laboriously along it, seeming glued to the earth by the monstrous
sticky heat of the veiled sun. Further back rose a number of bald
hills--rounded, swelling hills, shaped like a woman's breasts. And
behind all, pale china-blue against the tense white sky, was the
embankment of the distant ranges. Except for these, an ugly, uninviting
outlook, and one to wh