ore then.

'They didn't pray for him--they gave him a month. And, when he came
out, he went half-way across the road to meet the doctor, and he--to his
credit, perhaps--came the other half. They had a drink together, and
the Flour presented the doctor with a fine specimen of coarse gold for a
pin.

'"It was the will o' God, after all, doctor," said the Flour. "It was
the will o' God. Let bygones be bygones between us; gimme your hand,
doctor.... Good-bye."

'Then he left for Th' Canary.'

The Babies in the Bush.

'Oh, tell her a tale of the fairies bright--
That only the Bushmen know--
Who guide the feet of the lost aright,
Or carry them up through the starry night,
Where the Bush-lost babies go.'

He was one of those men who seldom smile. There are many in the
Australian Bush, where drift wrecks and failures of all stations and
professions (and of none), and from all the world. Or, if they do smile,
the smile is either mechanical or bitter as a rule--cynical. They seldom
talk. The sort of men who, as bosses, are set down by the majority--and
without reason or evidence--as being proud, hard, and selfish,--'too
mean to live, and too big for their boots.'

But when the Boss did smile his expression was very, very gentle, and
very sad. I have seen him smile down on a little child who persisted in
sitting on his knee and prattling to him, in spite of his silence and
gloom. He was tall and gaunt, with haggard grey eyes--haunted grey eyes
sometimes--and hair and beard thick and strong, but grey. He was not
above forty-five. He was of the type of men who die in harness, with
their hair thick and strong, but grey or white when it should be brown.
The opposite type, I fancy, would be the soft, dark-haired, blue-eyed
men who grow bald sooner than they grow grey, and fat and contented, and
die respectably in their beds.

His name was Head--Walter Head. He was a boss drover on the overland
routes. I engaged with him at a place north of the Queensland border to
travel down to Bathurst, on the Great Western Line in New South Wales,
with something over a thousand head of store bullocks for the Sydney
market. I am an Australian Bushman (with city experience)--a rover, of
course, and a ne'er-do-well, I suppose. I was born with brains and a
thin skin--worse luck! It was in the days before I was married, and I
went by the name of 'Jack Ellis' this trip,--not because the police
were after me,