away corner of
the great kitchen, where Mrs. Brown's cane armchair always stood. She
glanced up in surprise after a while, when a shadow fell across the
doorway. Then, for Mary was a girl with "nerves," she jumped up with a
little scream.

An Indian hawker stood there--a big, black-bearded fellow, in dusty
clothes that had once been white, and on his head a turban of faded
pink. His heavy pack hung from his shoulder, but as the girl looked, he
slipped it to the ground, and stood erect, with a grunt of relief. Then
he grinned faintly at Mary, who had promptly put the table between
them, and asked the hawker's universal question:

"Anything to-day, Meesis?"

The Hindu hawker is still a figure to be met frequently in the
Bush--where he is, indeed, something of an institution. "Remote from
towns he runs" a race that no poetical licence can stretch to complete
the quotation by calling "godly." He carries a queer mixture of goods--a
kind of condensed bazaar-stall from his native land, with silks and
cottons, soaps, scents, boot laces and cheap jewellery, all packed into
a marvellously small space; and so he tramps his way through Australia.
No life can be lonelier. His stock of English is generally barely
enough to enable him to complete his deals; the free and independent
Australian regards him as "a nigger," and despises him accordingly;
while the Hindu, in his turn, has in his inmost soul a scorn far deeper
for his scorners--the pride of tradition and of caste. It is the caste
that keeps him rigidly to himself, since, as a rule, he can touch no
food that others have handled. He sits apart, over his own tiny fire,
baking his unappetising little cakes; and in many cases even the shadow
of a passer-by falling across his cookery is held to defile it beyond
possibility of his eating it. As a rule he has but one idea in life--to
make enough money to carry him back to end his days in comfort by the
waters of the Ganges.

There are certain well recognized hawkers in many districts--men who
have kept for a long time to a particular beat, and may be regarded as
fairly regular, and likely to turn up at each place at their route
three or four times a year. Such men have generally arrived at the
dignity of a pack-horse--no unmixed benefit in the eyes of people
driving, since most of the country horses are reduced to frenzy by the
sight of the lean screw with his immense white pack--the hawker is
merciless to his horse--led by the