ey would be appreciated. On
my literary side Mrs. Barr Smith, a keen critic herself, fitted in with
me admirably, and what I owed to her in the way of books for about 10
years cannot be put on paper, and in my journalistic work she
delighted. Other friendships, both literary and personal, were formed
in the decade which started the elementary schools and the University.
The first Hughes professor of English literature was the Rev. John
Davidson of Chalmers Church, married to Harriet, daughter of Hugh
Miller, the self-taught ecologist and journalist.

On the day of the inauguration of the University the Davidsons asked
Miss Clark and myself to go with them, and there I met Miss Catherine
Mackay (now Mrs. Fred Martin), from Mount Gambier. I at first thought
her the daughter of a wealthy squatter of the south-east, but when I
found she was a litterateur trying to make a living by her pen,
bringing out a serial tale, "Bohemian Born," and writing occasional
articles, I drew to her at once. So long as the serial tale lasted she
could hold her own; but no one can make a living at occasional articles
in Australia, and she became a clerk in the Education Office, but still
cultivated literature in her leisure hours. She has published two
novels--"An Australian Girl" and "The Silent Sea"--which so good a
judge as F. W. H. Myers pronounced to be on the highest level ever
reached in Australian fiction, and in that opinion I heartily concur. I
take a very humble second place beside her, but in the seventies I
wrote "Gathered In," which I believed to be my best novel--the novel
into which I put the most of myself, the only novel I wrote with tears
of emotion. Mrs. Oliphant says that Jeanie Deans is more real to her
than any of her own creations, and probably it is the same with me,
except for this one work. From an old diary of the fifties, when my
first novels were written I take this extract:--"Queer that I who have
such a distinct idea of what I approve in flesh-and-blood men should
only achieve in pen and ink a set of impossible people, with an absurd
muddy expression of gloom, instead of sublime depth as I intended. Men
novelists' women are as impossible creations as my men, but there is
this difference--their productions satisfy them, mine fail to satisfy
me." But in my last novel--still unpublished--felt quite satisfied that
I had at last achieved my ambition to create characters that stood out
distinctly and real. Miss Clark t