a
distant range showed above the bush on the horizon.

I stood up and put my pipe away and stretched. Then he seemed to wake
up. "Better come back to the hut and have a bit of dinner," he said.
"The missus will about have it ready, and I'll spare you a handful of
hay for the horses."

The hay decided it. It was a dry season. I was surprised to hear of a
wife, for I thought he was a hatter--I had always heard so; but
perhaps I had been mistaken, and he had married lately; or had got a
housekeeper. The farm was an irregularly-shaped clearing in the scrub,
with a good many stumps in it, with a broken-down two-rail fence
along the frontage, and logs and "dog-leg" the rest. It was about
as lonely-looking a place as I had seen, and I had seen some
out-of-the-way, God-forgotten holes where men lived alone. The hut was
in the top corner, a two-roomed slab hut, with a shingle roof, which
must have been uncommon round there in the days when that hut was built.
I was used to bush carpentering, and saw that the place had been put
up by a man who had plenty of life and hope in front of him, and for
someone else beside himself. But there were two unfinished skilling
rooms built on to the back of the hut; the posts, sleepers, and
wall-plates had been well put up and fitted, and the slab walls were
up, but the roof had never been put on. There was nothing but burrs
and nettles inside those walls, and an old wooden bullock plough and a
couple of yokes were dry-rotting across the back doorway. The remains of
a straw-stack, some hay under a bark humpy, a small iron plough, and an
old stiff coffin-headed grey draught horse, were all that I saw about
the place.

But there was a bit of a surprise for me inside, in the shape of a clean
white tablecloth on the rough slab table which stood on stakes driven
into the ground. The cloth was coarse, but it was a tablecloth--not
a spare sheet put on in honour of unexpected visitors--and perfectly
clean. The tin plates, pannikins, and jam tins that served as sugar
bowls and salt cellars were polished brightly. The walls and fireplace
were whitewashed, the clay floor swept, and clean sheets of newspaper
laid on the slab mantleshelf under the row of biscuit tins that held the
groceries. I thought that his wife, or housekeeper, or whatever she was,
was a clean and tidy woman about a house. I saw no woman; but on the
sofa--a light, wooden, batten one, with runged arms at the ends--lay a
woman's dress