en Repeating Office for a punkah is acceded
to without further circumlocution, the growing movement in favour of
Separation will be openly advocated by this journal. Already (of this we
have private knowledge) has Lord Kimberley expressed himself astonished
at the heartless refusal of our benighted Colonial Secretary and
Treasurer to grant the insignificant sum of two hundred pounds to the
necessitous widow of Samuel Wilson, who was killed by being run over by
a trolley on our beautiful jetty. Does the Colonial Secretary know the
meaning of the word Nemesis? Let him ponder!"

The appearance of Bowen at this time of latent agitation for Separation
and open and undisguised animosity to the "upstart collection of humpies
on a mud bank in Cleveland Bay," was pleasing in the extreme. Wide,
tree-planted, grassy streets, kept scrupulously clean, handsomely-built
bungalows, enclosed in gardens containing tropical and sub-tropical
plants (the residences of the officials and their families), a
court-house and other public buildings of such size and ornate
construction that they surpassed those of any other town in the colony,
except the capital; an environment of back country grateful to look
upon, and a harbour of surpassing beauty.

The editor of the _Clarion_ despite his inflated leaders, was a
thoroughly sensible man, who fully recognised the potentialities of
the port, and yet saw that it was doomed to sink into comparative
insignificance, and that the "collection of humpies on a mud bank" was
to be the future capital of the Far North. But he struggled on gamely.
He was a genial, merry-hearted old bachelor, who had once loved his
paper as a mother loves her one child, and had spent his capital of two
thousand pounds in trying to keep the town alive as long as possible.
A refined, highly-educated man, he was obliged--after two years' bitter
financial experience--to resort to the type of journalism prevalent
amongst Australian country newspapers; otherwise he could not have made
a living. But he despised the very people for whom he was apparently
fighting so strenuously, and often savagely reproached himself for
having turned aside from the straight path.

"Thank Heaven, I'm not married!" he said to himself one evening, as
throwing himself down upon a couch in his bedroom at the Queen's Hotel,
he began to glance through a bundle of exchanges which he had brought
from the office, and in a few minutes a smile spread over his f