like any other), and a nasty bit
of sand-dusty road that I was always glad to get over in wet weather.
To the left on our side of the creek were reedy marshes, with frogs
croaking, and across the creek the dark box-scrub-covered ridges ended
in steep 'sidings' coming down to the creek-bank, and to the main road
that skirted them, running on west up over a 'saddle' in the ridges and
on towards Dubbo. The road by Lahey's Creek to a place called Cobborah
branched off, through dreary apple-tree and stringy-bark flats, to the
left, just beyond the crossing: all these fanlike branch tracks from the
Cudgeegong were inside a big horse-shoe in the Great Western Line, and
so they gave small carriers a chance, now that Cob & Co.'s coaches and
the big teams and vans had shifted out of the main western terminus.
There were tall she-oaks all along the creek, and a clump of big ones
over a deep water-hole just above the crossing. The creek oaks have
rough barked trunks, like English elms, but are much taller, and higher
to the branches--and the leaves are reedy; Kendel, the Australian
poet, calls them the 'she-oak harps Aeolian'. Those trees are always
sigh-sigh-sighing--more of a sigh than a sough or the 'whoosh' of
gum-trees in the wind. You always hear them sighing, even when you can't
feel any wind. It's the same with telegraph wires: put your head against
a telegraph-post on a dead, still day, and you'll hear and feel the
far-away roar of the wires. But then the oaks are not connected with the
distance, where there might be wind; and they don't ROAR in a gale, only
sigh louder and softer according to the wind, and never seem to go above
or below a certain pitch,--like a big harp with all the strings the
same. I used to have a theory that those creek oaks got the wind's voice
telephoned to them, so to speak, through the ground.

I happened to look down, and there was Jim (I thought he was on the
tarpaulin, playing with the pup): he was standing close beside me with
his legs wide apart, his hands behind his back, and his back to the
fire.

He held his head a little on one side, and there was such an old, old,
wise expression in his big brown eyes--just as if he'd been a child for
a hundred years or so, or as though he were listening to those oaks and
understanding them in a fatherly sort of way.

'Dad!' he said presently--'Dad! do you think I'll ever grow up to be a
man?'

'Wh--why, Jim?' I gasped.

'Because I don't want to.