e seen funerals
trotting fast in London, and they are trotting more and more in
Australian cities, with only "the time" for an excuse. But in the bush I
have never seen a funeral faster than the slowest of walks no matter who
or what might wait, or what might happen or be lost. They stood by their
dead well out there. Maybe some of the big, simple souls had a sort of
vague idea that the departed would stand a better show if
accompanied as far as possible by the greatest possible number of
friends--"barrackers," so to speak.

Here all the shallow and involuntary sham of it, the shirking of a dull
and irksome duty--a bore, though the route be only a mile or so. The
satisfied undertaker, and the hard-up professional mutes and mourners
in seedy, mouldy, greeny-black, and with boozers' faces and noses and a
constant craving for beer to help them bear up against their grief and
keep their mock solemn faces. Out there you were carried to the hearse
or trap from your home, and from the hearse or trap to your grave--and
with infinite carefulness and gentleness--on the shoulders of men, and
of men who had known and loved you.

There had been wonder and waiting in the morning for Ben Duggan; and
the women especially, on the way home, when free from restraint, were
greatly indignant against him. To think that he should break out and go
on the drunk on this day of all days, when his oldest mate and friend
was being carried to his grave. The men, knowing how he had ridden all
night, found great excuses; but later on some grew anxious and wondered
what could have become of him.

Some, returning home by a short cut, passed over Dead Man's Gap beyond
Lowe's Peak.

"Wonder what could have become of Ben Duggan." mused one, as they rode
down.

There and then their wonders ceased.

A party of road-clearers had been at work along the bottom, and there
was much smoke from the burning-off, which must have made the track dim
and vague and uncertain at night. Just at the foot of the gap, clear
of the rough going, a newly-fallen tree lay across the track. It was
stripped--had been stripped late the previous afternoon, in fact; and,
well, you won't know, what a log like that is when the sap is well
up until you have stepped casually on to it to take a look round. A
confident skip, with your boot soles well greased, on to the ice in a
glaciarium for the first time would be nothing to it in its results, I
fancy. (I remember we children used