droving; he was his brother, or,
at least, his half-brother, but he hadn't heard of him for years;
he'd last heard of him at Blackall, in Queensland; he might have gone
overland to Western Australia with Tyson's cattle to the new country.

We talked about grubbing and fencing and digging and droving and
shearing--all about the bush--and it all came back to me as we talked.
"I can see it all now," he said once, in an abstracted tone, seeming to
fix his helpless eyes on the wall opposite. But he didn't see the dirty
blind wall, nor the dingy window, nor the skimpy little bed, nor the
greasy wash-stand; he saw the dark blue ridges in the sunlight, the
grassy sidings and flats, the creek with clumps of she-oak here and
there, the course of the willow-fringed river below, the distant peaks
and ranges fading away into a lighter azure, the granite ridge in
the middle distance, and the rocky rises, the stringy-bark and the
apple-tree flats, the scrubs, and the sunlit plains--and all. I could
see it, too--plainer than ever I did.

He had done a bit of fencing in his time, and we got talking about
timber. He didn't believe in having fencing-posts with big butts; he
reckoned it was a mistake. "You see," he said, "the top of the butt
catches the rain water and makes the post rot quicker. I'd back posts
without any butt at all to last as long or longer than posts with
'em--that's if the fence is well put up and well rammed." He had
supplied fencing stuff, and fenced by contract, and--well, you can get
more posts without butts out of a tree than posts with them. He also
objected to charring the butts. He said it only made more work--and
wasted time--the butts lasted longer without being charred.

I asked him if he'd ever got stringy-bark palings or shingles out of
mountain ash, and he smiled a smile that did my heart good to see, and
said he had. He had also got them out of various other kinds of trees.

We talked about soil and grass, and gold-digging, and many other things
which came back to one like a revelation as we yarned.

He had been to the hospital several times. "The doctors don't say they
can cure me," he said, "they say they might, be able to improve my sight
and hearing, but it would take a long time--anyway, the treatment would
improve my general health. They know what's the matter with my eyes,"
and he explained it as well as he could. "I wish I'd seen a good
doctor when my eyes first began to get weak; but young c