spent the remainder of the night dozing in a chair.

So now he was heavy-eyed, uncommunicative. As they climbed the shoulder
and came to the rich, black soil that surrounded the ancient cone of
Warrenheip, he mused on his personal relation to the place he had just
left. And not for the first time he asked himself: what am I doing
here? When he was absent from Ballarat, and could dispassionately
consider the life he led there, he was so struck by the incongruity of
the thing that, like the beldame in the nursery-tale, he could have
pinched himself to see whether he waked or slept. Had anyone told him,
three years previously, that the day was coming when he would weigh out
soap and sugar, and hand them over a counter in exchange for money, he
would have held the prophet ripe for Bedlam. Yet here he was, a
full-blown tradesman, and as greedy of gain as any tallow-chandler.
Extraordinary, aye, and distressing, too, the ease with which the human
organism adapted itself; it was just a case of the green caterpillar on
the green leaf. Well, he could console himself with the knowledge that
his apparent submission was only an affair of the surface. He had
struck no roots; and it would mean as little to his half-dozen
acquaintances on Ballarat when he silently vanished from their midst,
as it would to him if he never saw one of them again. Or the country
either--and he let his eye roam unlovingly over the wild, sad-coloured
landscape, with its skimpy, sad-coloured trees.

Meanwhile they were advancing: their nags' hoofs, beating in unison,
devoured mile after mile of the road. It was a typical colonial road;
it went up hill and down dale, turned aside for no obstacles. At one
time it ran down a gully that was almost a ravine, to mount straight up
the opposite side among boulders that reached to the belly-bands. At
others, it led through a reedy swamp, or a stony watercourse; or it
became a bog; or dived through a creek. Where the ground was flat and
treeless, it was a rutty, well-worn track between two seas of pale,
scant grass.

More than once, complaining of a mouth like sawdust, Purdy alighted and
limped across the verandah of a house-of-accommodation; but they did
not actually draw rein till, towards midday, they reached a knot of
weatherboard verandahed stores, smithies and public-houses, arranged at
the four Corners of two cross-roads. Here they made a substantial
luncheon; and the odour of fried onions carried far and wi