's rest at the Lost Souls' Hotel.
But I wouldn't let on that I was old Mitchell, the millionaire, who
founded Lost Souls'. They might be too officious, and I hate fuss....
But it's time to take the track, Harry."

There came a cool breeze with sunset; we stood up stiffly, shouldered
our swags and tucker-bags, and pushed on, for we had to make the next
water before we camped. We were out of tobacco, so we borrowed some from
one of the bullock-drivers.

THE BOOZERS' HOME

"A dipsomaniac," said Mitchell, "needs sympathy and commonsense
treatment. (Sympathy's a grand and glorious thing, taking it all round
and looking at it any way you will: a little of it makes a man think
that the world's a good world after all, and there's room and hope for
sinners, and that life's worth living; enough of it makes him sure of
it: and an overdose of sympathy makes a man _feel_ weak and ashamed of
himself, and so moves him to stop whining--and wining--and buck up.)

"Now, I'm not taking the case of a workman who goes on the spree on
pay night and sweats the drink out of himself at work next day, nor a
slum-bred brute who guzzles for the love of it; but a man with brains,
who drinks to drown his intellect or his memory. He's generally a man
under it all, and a sensitive, generous, gentle man with finer feelings
as often as not. The best and cleverest and whitest men in the world
seem to take to drink mostly. It's an awful pity. Perhaps it's because
they're straight and the world's crooked and they can see things too
plain. And I suppose in the bush the loneliness and the thoughts of the
girl-world they left behind help to sink 'em.

"Now a drunkard seldom reforms at home, because he's always surrounded
by the signs of the ruin and misery he has brought on the home; and
the sight and thought of it sets him off again before he's had time to
recover from the last spree. Then, again, the noblest wife in the
world mostly goes the wrong way to work with a drunken husband--nearly
everything she does is calculated to irritate him. If, for instance,
he brings a bottle home from the pub, it shows that he wants to stay at
home and not go back to the pub any more; but the first thing the wife
does is to get hold of the bottle and plant it, or smash it before his
eyes, and that maddens him in the state he is in then.

"No. A dipsomaniac needs to be taken away from home for a while. I knew
a man that got so bad that the way he acted at home