ny rational amusement, and anything between hard
work and idle dissipation.'

'And suppose you had all this power,' I said--for if I was afraid of
father there wasn't another man living that could overcrow me--'don't
you think you'd know the way to keep all the good things for yourselves?
Hasn't it always been so?'

'I see your argument,' he said, quite quiet and reasonable, just as if I
had been a swell like himself--that was why he was unlike any other man
I ever knew--'and it is a perfectly fair way of putting it. But your
class might, I think, always rely upon there being enough kindness and
wisdom in ours to prevent that state of things. Unfortunately, neither
side trusts the other enough. And now the bell is going to ring, I
think.'

Jim and I stopped at Boree shed till all the sheep were cut out. It pays
well if the weather is pretty fair, and it isn't bad fun when there's
twenty or thirty chaps of the right sort in the shearers' hut; there's
always some fun going on. Shearers work pretty hard, and as they buy
their own rations generally, they can afford to live well. After a hard
day's shearing--that is, from five o'clock in the morning to seven at
night, going best pace all the time, every man working as hard as if he
was at it for his life--one would think a man would be too tired to do
anything. But we were mostly strong and hearty, and at that age a man
takes a deal of killing; so we used to have a little card-playing at
night to pass away the time.

Very few of the fellows had any money to spend. They couldn't get any
either until shearing was over and they were paid off; but they'd get
some one who could write to scribble a lot of I O U's, and they did as
well.

We used to play 'all-fours' and 'loo', and now and then an American
game which some of the fellows had picked up. It was strange how soon we
managed to get into big stakes. I won at first, and then Jim and I began
to lose, and had such a lot of I O U's out that I was afraid we'd have
no money to take home after shearing. Then I began to think what a fool
I'd been to play myself and drag Jim into it, for he didn't want to play
at first.

One day I got a couple of letters from home--one from Aileen and another
in a strange hand. It had come to our little post-office, and Aileen had
sent it on to Boree.

When I opened it there were a few lines, with father's name at the
bottom. He couldn't write, so I made sure that Starlight had written
it