of it that time.

About five miles along, just as I turned into the main road, I heard
some one galloping after me, and I saw young James on his hack. I got a
start, for I thought that something had gone wrong at home. I remember,
the first day I left Mary on the creek, for the first five or six miles
I was half-a-dozen times on the point of turning back--only I thought
she'd laugh at me.

'What is it, James?' I shouted, before he came up--but I saw he was
grinning.

'Mary says to tell you not to forget to bring a hoe out with you.'

'You clear off home!' I said, 'or I'll lay the whip about your young
hide; and don't come riding after me again as if the run was on fire.'

'Well, you needn't get shirty with me!' he said. '*I* don't want to have
anything to do with a hoe.' And he rode off.

I DID get thinking about those potatoes, though I hadn't meant to. I
knew of an independent man in that district who'd made his money out
of a crop of potatoes; but that was away back in the roaring
'Fifties--'54--when spuds went up to twenty-eight shillings a
hundredweight (in Sydney), on account of the gold rush. We might get
good rain now, and, anyway, it wouldn't cost much to put the potatoes
in. If they came on well, it would be a few pounds in my pocket; if the
crop was a failure, I'd have a better show with Mary next time she was
struck by an idea outside housekeeping, and have something to grumble
about when I felt grumpy.

I got a couple of bags of potatoes--we could use those that were
left over; and I got a small iron plough and a harrow that Little the
blacksmith had lying in his yard and let me have cheap--only about
a pound more than I told Mary I gave for them. When I took advice, I
generally made the mistake of taking more than was offered, or adding
notions of my own. It was vanity, I suppose. If the crop came on well I
could claim the plough-and-harrow part of the idea, anyway. (It didn't
strike me that if the crop failed Mary would have the plough and harrow
against me, for old Corny would plough the ground for ten or fifteen
shillings.) Anyway, I'd want a plough and harrow later on, and I might
as well get it now; it would give James something to do.

I came out by the western road, by Guntawang, and up the creek home; and
the first thing I saw was old Corny George ploughing the flat. And
Mary was down on the bank superintending. She'd got James with the
trace-chains and the spare horses, and had made him c