blacks from Poonee Creek to come and join the dance."

The overseer was a dapper Victorian with a golden mustache twisted
rakishly up and down at either end respectively, like an overturned
letter S. He lived up to the name of Smart. The bookkeeper was a servile
echo with a character and a face of putty. He had once perpetrated an
opprobrious ode to the overseer, and had answered to the name of Chaucer
ever since.

Carmichael leaned back to look from one of these worthies to the other,
and his spectacled eyes flamed with mordant scorn.

"I suppose you think you're funny, you fellows," said he, and without
the oath which was a sign of his good-will, except when he lost his
temper with the sheep. "If so, I wish you'd get outside to entertain
each other. Since the fellow's coming we shall have to let him come, and
the thing is how to choke him off ever coming again without open insult,
which I won't allow. A service of some sort we shall have to have, this
once."

"I'm on to guy it," declared the indiscreet Chaucer.

"If you do I'll rehearse the men," the overseer promised.

"You idiots!" thundered Carmichael, whose temper was as short as his
sight. "Can't you see I weaken on the prospect as much as the two of you
stuck together? But the beggar's certain to be a public-school and
'Varsity man: and I won't have him treated as though he'd been dragged
up in one of these God-forsaken Colonies!"

Now--most properly--you cannot talk like this in the bush unless you are
also capable of confirming the insult with your fists. But Carmichael
could; and he was much too blind to fight without his glasses. He was,
in fact, the same strenuous character who had set his dogmatic face
against the most harmless expletives in dormitory at school, and set it
successfully, because Carmichael was a mighty man, whose influence was
not to be withstood. His standard alone was changed. Or he was playing
on the other side. Yet he had brought a prayer-book with him to the
back-blocks. And he was seen studying it on the eve of the episcopal
descent.

"He may have his say," observed Carmichael, darkly, "and then I'll have
mine."

"Going to heckle him?" inquired Smart, in a nasal voice full of hope and
encouragement.

"Not at the function, you fool," replied Carmichael, sweetly. "But when
it's all over I should like to take him on about the Athanasian Creed
and the Thirty-nine Articles." Only both substantives were qualified by
the epithet