inning their wild moaning cry. From the rifts in the dark
lone ranges, far down the river, it comes like a hunted spirit until it
makes me feel--

At this point I said, "Bah! I'm mad to write to Everard Grey like this.
He would laugh and call me a poor little fool." I tore the half-finished
letter to shreds, and consigned it to the kitchen fire. I substituted a
prim formal note, merely thanking him for the books and magazine he had
sent me. To this I never received an answer. I heard through his letters
to grannie that he was much occupied. Had been to Brisbane and Melbourne
on important cases, so very likely had not time to be bothered with me;
or, he might have been like the majority of his fellows who make a great
parade of friendship while with one, then go away and forget one's
existence in an hour.

While at Caddagat there were a few duties allotted to me. One of these
was to attend to the drawing-room; another was to find uncle Jay-Jay's
hat when he mislaid it--often ten times per day. I assisted my grandmother
to make up her accounts and write business letters, and I attended to
tramps. A man was never refused a bit to cat at Caddagat. This
necessitated the purchase of an extra ton of flour per year, also nearly
a ton of sugar, to say nothing of tea, potatoes, beef, and all broken
meats which went thus. This was not reckoning the consumption of victuals
by the other class of travellers with which the house was generally full
year in and year out. Had there been any charge for their board and
lodging, the Bossiers would surely have made a fortune. I interviewed on
an average fifty tramps a week, and seldom saw the same man twice. What a
great army they were! Hopeless, homeless, aimless, shameless souls,
tramping on from north to south, and east to west, never relinquishing
their heart-sickening, futile quest for work--some of them so long on the
tramp that the ambitions of manhood had been ground out of them, and they
wished for nothing more than this.

There were all shapes, sizes, ages, kinds, and conditions of men--the
shamefaced boy in the bud of his youth, showing by the way he begged that
the humiliation of the situation had not yet worn off, and poor old
creatures tottering on the brink of the grave, with nothing left in life
but the enjoyment of beer and tobacco. There were strong men in their
prime who really desired work when they asked for it, and skulking
cowards who hoped they would not get it. T