life--my career--my brilliant career!

Weariness! Weariness!

The summer sun danced on. Summer is fiendish, and life is a curse, I said
in my heart. What a great dull hard rock the world was! On it were a few
barren narrow ledges, and on these, by exerting ourselves so that the
force wears off our finger-nails, it allows us to hang for a year or two,
and then hurls us off into outer darkness and oblivion, perhaps to endure
worse torture than this.

The poor beast moaned. The lifting had strained her, and there were
patches of hide worn off her the size of breakfast-plates, sore and most
harrowing to look upon.

It takes great suffering to wring a moan from the patience of a cow. I
turned my head away, and with the impatience and one-sided reasoning
common to fifteen, asked God what He meant by this. It is well enough to
heap suffering on human beings, seeing it is supposed to be merely a
probation for a better world, but animals--poor, innocent animals--why are
they tortured so?

"Come now, we'll lift her once more," said my father. At it we went
again; it is surprising what weight there is in the poorest cow. With
great struggling we got her to her feet once more, and were careful this
time to hold her till she got steady on her legs. Father and mother at
the tail and Blackshaw and I at the horns, we marched her home and gave
her a bran mash. Then we turned to our work in the house while the men
sat and smoked and spat on the veranda, discussing the drought for an
hour, at the end of which time they went to help someone else with their
stock. I made up the fire and we continued our ironing, which had been
interrupted some hours before. It was hot unpleasant work on such a day.
We were forced to keep the doors and windows closed on account of the
wind and dust. We were hot and tired, and our feet ached so that we could
scarcely stand on them.

Weariness! Weariness!

Summer is fiendish and life is a curse, I said in my heart.

Day after day the drought continued. Now and again there would be a few
days of the raging wind before mentioned, which carried the dry grass off
the paddocks and piled it against the fences, darkened the air with dust,
and seemed to promise rain, but ever it dispersed whence it came, taking
with it the few clouds it had gathered up; and for weeks and weeks at a
stretch, from horizon to horizon, was never a speck to mar the cruel
dazzling brilliance of the metal sky.

Weariness! Wearine