strange to him. He's a
different man. He finds that he never knew anything about women. He sees
none of woman's little ways and tricks in his girl. He is in heaven one
day and down near the other place the next; and that's the sort of thing
that makes life interesting. He takes his new world for granted. And,
when she says she'll be his wife----!

Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they've got a
lot of influence on your married life afterwards--a lot more than you'd
think. Make the best of them, for they'll never come any more, unless
we do our courting over again in another world. If we do, I'll make the
most of mine.

But, looking back, I didn't do so badly after all. I never told you
about the days I courted Mary. The more I look back the more I come to
think that I made the most of them, and if I had no more to regret in
married life than I have in my courting days, I wouldn't walk to and fro
in the room, or up and down the yard in the dark sometimes, or lie awake
some nights thinking.... Ah well!

I was between twenty-one and thirty then: birthdays had never been any
use to me, and I'd left off counting them. You don't take much stock in
birthdays in the Bush. I'd knocked about the country for a few years,
shearing and fencing and droving a little, and wasting my life without
getting anything for it. I drank now and then, and made a fool of
myself. I was reckoned 'wild'; but I only drank because I felt less
sensitive, and the world seemed a lot saner and better and kinder when
I had a few drinks: I loved my fellow-man then and felt nearer to him.
It's better to be thought 'wild' than to be considered eccentric
or ratty. Now, my old mate, Jack Barnes, drank--as far as I could
see--first because he'd inherited the gambling habit from his father
along with his father's luck: he'd the habit of being cheated and losing
very bad, and when he lost he drank. Till drink got a hold on him. Jack
was sentimental too, but in a different way. I was sentimental about
other people--more fool I!--whereas Jack was sentimental about himself.
Before he was married, and when he was recovering from a spree, he'd
write rhymes about 'Only a boy, drunk by the roadside', and that sort of
thing; and he'd call 'em poetry, and talk about signing them and sending
them to the 'Town and Country Journal'. But he generally tore them up
when he got better. The Bush is breeding a race of poets, and I don't
know what the cou