to work up a practice? ... found it
impossible to make a living? His plate had been on the door for close
on two months now, and he had barely a five-pound note to show for it.
What was to be done? Here Polly's words came back to him with new
stress. "Not nearly enough people know you've started." That was
it!--Polly had laid her finger on the hitch. The genteel manners of the
old country did not answer here; instead of sitting twiddling his
thumbs, waiting for patients to seek him out, he ought to have adopted
the screaming methods of advertisement in vogue on Ballarat. To have
had "Holloway's Pills sold here!" "Teeth extracted painlessly!" "Cures
guaranteed!" painted man-high on his outside house-wall. To have gone
up and down and round the township; to have been on the spot when
accidents happened; to have hobnobbed with Tom, Dick and Harry in bars
and saloons. And he saw a figure that looked like his the centre of a
boisterous crowd; saw himself slapped on the back by dirty hands,
shouting and shouted to drinks. He turned his pillow, to drive the
image away. Whatever he had done or not done, the fact remained that a
couple of weeks hence he had to make up the sum of over thirty pounds.
And again he discerned a phantom self, this time a humble supplicant
for an extension of term, brought up short against Ocock's stony
visage, flouted by his cocksy clerk. Once more he turned his pillow.
These quarterly payments, which dotted all his coming years, were like
little rock-islands studding the surface of an ocean, and telling of
the sunken continent below: this monstrous thousand odd pounds he had
been fool enough to borrow. Never would he be able to pay off such a
sum, never again be free from the incubus of debt. Meanwhile, not the
ground he stood on, not the roof over his head could actually be called
his own. He had also been too pushed for money, at the time, to take
Ocock's advice and insure his life.

These thoughts spun themselves to a nightmare-web, in which he was the
hapless fly. Putting a finger to his wrist, he found he had the pulse
of a hundred that was not uncommon to him. He got out of bed, to dowse
his head in a basin of water. Polly, only half awake, sat up and said:
"What's the matter, dear? Are you ill?" In replying to her he disturbed
the children, the door of whose room stood ajar; and by the time quiet
was restored, further sleep was out of the question. He dressed and
quitted the house.

Day was