as the highest
form of patriotism on both sides. And, by the way, it was, is, and shall
always be the women who are first to pity and help the rebel refugee or
the fallen enemy.

Succour thine enemy.

There must have been a lot of human kindness under the smothering,
stifling cloud of the "System" and behind the iron clank and swishing
"cat" strokes of brutality--a lot of soul light in the darkness of our
dark past--a page that has long since been closed down--when innocent
men and women were transported to shame, misery, and horror; when mere
boys were sent out on suspicion of stealing a hare from the squire's
preserves, and mere girls on suspicion of lifting a riband from the
merchant's counter. But the many kindly and self-sacrificing and
even noble things that free and honest settlers did, in those days of
loneliness and hardship, for wretched runaway convicts and others,
are closed down with the pages too. My old grandmother used to tell me
tales, but--well, I don't suppose a wanted man (or a man that wasn't
wanted, for that matter) ever turned away from her huts, far back in
the wild bush, without a quart of coffee and a "feed" inside his hunted
carcass, or went short of a bit of bread and meat to see him on, and a
gruff but friendly hint, maybe, from the old man himself. And they were
a type of the early settlers, she an English lady and the daughter of a
clergyman. Ah! well--

Do you ever seem to remember things that you could not possibly
remember? Something that happened in your mother's life, maybe, if you
are a girl, or your father's, if you are a boy--that happened to your
mother or father some years, perhaps, before you were born. I have many
such haunting memories--as of having once witnessed a murder, or an
attempt at murder, for instance, and once seeing a tree fall on a
man--and as a child I had a memory of having been a man myself once
before. But here is one of the pictures.

A hut in a dark gully; slab and stringy-bark, two rooms and a detached
kitchen with the boys' room roughly partitioned off it. Big clay
fire-place with a big log fire in it. The settler, or selector, and his
wife; another man who might have been "uncle," and a younger woman who
might have been "aunt;" two little boys and the baby. It was raining
heavens hard outside, and the night was as black as pitch. The uncle was
reading a report in a paper (that seemed to have come, somehow, a
long way from somewhere) about two men w