crease the surprise. We were swells then for
a while; I heard no more of a buggy until after we'd been settled at
Lahey's Creek for a couple of years.

I told you how I went into the carrying line, and took up a selection at
Lahey's Creek--for a run for the horses and to grow a bit of feed--and
shifted Mary and little Jim out there from Gulgong, with Mary's young
scamp of a brother James to keep them company while I was on the road.
The first year I did well enough carrying, but I never cared for it--it
was too slow; and, besides, I was always anxious when I was away from
home. The game was right enough for a single man--or a married one whose
wife had got the nagging habit (as many Bushwomen have--God help 'em!),
and who wanted peace and quietness sometimes. Besides, other small
carriers started (seeing me getting on); and Tom Tarrant, the
coach-driver at Cudgeegong, had another heavy spring-van built, and put
it on the roads, and he took a lot of the light stuff.

The second year I made a rise--out of 'spuds', of all the things in the
world. It was Mary's idea. Down at the lower end of our selection--Mary
called it 'the run'--was a shallow watercourse called Snake's Creek, dry
most of the year, except for a muddy water-hole or two; and, just above
the junction, where it ran into Lahey's Creek, was a low piece of good
black-soil flat, on our side--about three acres. The flat was fairly
clear when I came to the selection--save for a few logs that had been
washed up there in some big 'old man' flood, way back in black-fellows'
times; and one day, when I had a spell at home, I got the horses and
trace-chains and dragged the logs together--those that wouldn't split
for fencing timber--and burnt them off. I had a notion to get the flat
ploughed and make a lucern-paddock of it. There was a good water-hole,
under a clump of she-oak in the bend, and Mary used to take her stools
and tubs and boiler down there in the spring-cart in hot weather, and
wash the clothes under the shade of the trees--it was cooler, and
saved carrying water to the house. And one evening after she'd done the
washing she said to me--

'Look here, Joe; the farmers out here never seem to get a new idea: they
don't seem to me ever to try and find out beforehand what the market is
going to be like--they just go on farming the same old way and putting
in the same old crops year after year. They sow wheat, and, if it comes
on anything like the thing, they re