the facts about the life in the Bush. There is a very
charming writer about Australian children, Ethel Turner, who in one of
her stories gives a picture of a little Bush school in one of the most
dreary places in Australia--a little township out on the hot plains. I
quote a little of it to show the sort of spirit which animates the
school-teachers of Australia:

"A new teacher had been appointed to the half-time school, which was all
the Government could manage for so unimportant and dreary a place. His
name was Eagar, and his friends said that he suited the sound of it.
Alert of eye, energetic in movement, it may be safely said that in his
own person was stored up more motive power than was owned conjointly by
the two hundred odd souls who comprised the population of Ninety Mile.

"There was room in Ninety Mile for an eager person. In fact, a dozen
such would have sufficed long since to have carried it clean off its
feet, and to have deposited it in some more likely position. But
everyone touched in any way with the fire of life had long since
departed from the place, and gone to set their homesteads and
stackyards, their shops or other businesses elsewhere. So there were
only a few limpets, who clung tenaciously to their spot, assured that
all other spots on the globe were already occupied; and a few absolutely
resigned persons. There is no clog on the wheel of progress that may be
so absolutely depended upon to fulfil its purpose as resignation.

"It was to this manner of a village that Eagar came. In a month he had
established a cricket club; in two months a football club. The
establishment of neither was attended with any great difficulty. In
three months he had turned his own box of books into a free circulating
library, and many of his leisure hours went in trying to induce the boys
to borrow from him, and in seeing to it that, having borrowed, they
actually read the books chosen.

"But his success with this was doubtful. The boys regarded 'Westward
Ho!' as a home-lesson, while the 'Three Musketeers' set fire to none of
them. Even 'Treasure Island' left most of them cold; though Eagar,
reading it aloud, had tried to persuade himself that little Rattray had
breathed a trifle quicker as the blind man's stick came tap tapping
along the road. The sea was nothing but a name to the whole number of
scholars (eighteen of them, boys and girls all told). Not one of them
had pierced past the township that lay ninety mile