gloomy brow) and said he should like to write a letter to the editor of
the _Trumpet-Call_. He wrote his letter--on bank paper--and then went
back to Sum Fat's to await developments. The following morning he
received a note from the editor telling him to call at the office. To
Susie Sum Fat, his landlord's pretty half-caste daughter, he showed
the missive, and asked her to lend him one of her father's best shirts.
Susie, who liked Denison for his nice ways, and the tender manner in
which he squeezed her hand when passing the bread, promptly brought him
her parent's entire stock of linen, and bade him, with a soft smile, to
take his pick. Also that night she brought him a blue silk kummerbund
streaked with scarlet, and laid it on his pillow, with a written
intimation that it was sent 'with fondiest love from Susie S. Fat.'

Arrayed in a clean shirt, and the swagger kummerbund, Denison presented
himself next morning to the editor of the _Trumpet-Call_. There were
seven other applicants for the billet, but Denison's white shirt and
new kummerbund were, he felt, a tower of strength to him, and even the
editor of the _Trumpet-Call_ seemed impressed--clean shirts being an
anomaly in Cooktown journalistic circles.

The editor was a tall, stately man, with red eyes and a distinctly
alcoholic breath. The other applicants went in first. Each one had a
bundle of very dirty testimonials, all of which recalled to Denison
Judge Norbury's remarks about the 'tender' letters of a certain breach
of promise case. One little man, with bandy legs and a lurching gait,
put his unclean hands on the editorial table, and said that his father
was 'select preacher to the University of Oxford.'

The red-eyed man said he was proud to know him. 'Your father, sir, was
a learned man and I reverence his name. But I never could forgive myself
did I permit a son of such a great teacher to accept such a laborious
position as proof-reader on the _Trumpet Call_. Go to Sydney or
Melbourne, my dear sir. The editors of all our leading colonial papers
were clergymen or are sons of clergymen. I should be doing your future
prospects a bitter injustice. A bright career awaits you in this new
country.'

He shook the hand of the select preacher's son and sent him out.

Among the other applicants was a man who had tried dugong fishing on
the Great Barrier Reef; a broken-down advance agent from a stranded
theatrical company; a local auctioneer with defective visio