heat until rescued by the
wet bagging. I had a heavy day's work before me, and, from my exertions
of the day before, was tired at the beginning. Bush-fires had been raging
in the vicinity during the week, and yesterday had come so close that I
had been called out to carry buckets of water all the afternoon in the
blazing sun. The fire had been allayed, after making a gap in one of our
boundary fences. Father and the boys had been forced to leave the
harvesting of the miserable pinched wheat while they went to mend it, as
the small allowance of grass the drought gave us was precious, and had to
be carefully preserved from neighbours' stock.

I had baked and cooked, scrubbed floors and whitewashed hearths, scoured
tinware and cutlery, cleaned windows, swept yards, and discharged
numerous miscellaneous jobs, and half-past two in the afternoon found me
very dirty and very tired, and with very much more yet to do.

One of my half-starved poddy calves was very ill, and I went out to
doctor it previous to bathing and tidying myself for my finishing
household duties.

My mother was busy upon piles and piles of wearying mending, which was
one of the most hopeless of the many slaveries of her life. This was hard
work, and my father was slaving away in the sun, and mine was arduous
labour, and it was a very hot day, and a drought-smitten and a long day,
and poddy calves ever have a tendency to make me moralize and snarl. This
was life, my life and my parents' life, and the life of those around us,
and if I was a good girl and honoured my parents I would he rewarded with
a long stretch of it. Yah!

These pagan meditations were interrupted by a footfall slowly
approaching. I did not turn to ascertain who it might be, but trusted it
was no one of importance, as the poddy and I presented rather a grotesque
appearance. It was one of the most miserable and sickly of its miserable
kind, and I was in the working uniform of the Australian peasantry. My
tattered skirt and my odd and bursted boots, laced with twine, were
spattered with whitewash, for coolness my soiled cotton blouse hung
loose, an exceedingly dilapidated sun-bonnet surmounted my head, and a
bottle of castor-oil was in my hand.

I supposed it was one of the neighbours or a tea-agent, and I would send
them to mother.

The footsteps had come to a halt beside me.

"Could you tell me if--"

I glanced upwards. Horrors! There stood Harold Beecham, as tall and broad
as of