aller
rural industries--dairying, market gardening, and the like--demand
much labour of a more or less unskilled and mechanical sort, but do
not provide returns justifying the payment of high wages. In this
regard St. Peter's was, of course, ideally situated. It paid no wages,
and employed twenty pairs of hands for every one pair employed by the
average producer in the district.

II

Looking back now upon the period I spent as an 'inmate' of St. Peter's
Orphanage, it seems a queer unreal interlude enough; possessing some
of the qualities of a dream, including brevity and detachment from the
rest of my life. But well I know that in the living there was nothing
in the least dream-like about it; and, so far from being brief, I know
there were times when it seemed that all the rest of my life had been
but a day or so, by comparison with the grey, interminable vista of
the St. Peter's period.

It appears to me now as something rather wonderful that I ever should
have been able to win clear of St. Peter's to anything else; at all
events, to anything so unlike St. Peter's as the most of my life has
been. How was it I did not eventually succeed Tim, the punt-man, or
become the hind of one or other of the small farmers about the
district, as did most of the Orphanage lads? The scope life offered to
the orphans of St. Peter's was something easily to be taken in by the
naked eye from Myall Creek. It embraced only the simplest kind of
labouring occupations, and included no faintest hint of London, or of
the great kaleidoscopic world lying between Australia and England; no
sort of suggestion of the infinitely changeful and various thing that
life has been for me.

It is certain that I cherish no sort of resentment or malice where the
Orphanage and its sisters are concerned. But neither will I pretend to
have the slightest feeling of gratitude or benevolence towards them. I
should not wish to contribute to their funds, though I possessed all
the wealth of the Americas. And I will say that I think those
responsible for the conduct of the place were singularly indifferent,
or blind, to the immense opportunities for productive well-doing which
lay at their feet.

Here were sixty orphans; lads for the most part plastic as clay. The
sisters were the potters. No ruling sovereign possesses a tithe of the
absolute authority that was theirs. They literally held the powers of
life and death. Unquestioned and god-like they moved sere