,"'--

The Boss would straighten up with a sigh that might have been half a yawn--
'"And he slept and never saw it rise,"'
--speaking with a sort of quiet force all the time.
Then maybe he'd stand with his back to the fire roasting his dusty leggings,
with his hands behind his back and looking out over the dusky plain.

'"What mattered the sand or the whit'ning chalk,
The blighted herbage or blackened log,
The crooked beak of the eagle-hawk,
Or the hot red tongue of the native dog?"

They don't matter much, do they, Jack?'

'Damned if I think they do, Boss!' I'd say.

'"The couch was rugged, those sextons rude,
But, in spite of a leaden shroud, we know
That the bravest and fairest are earth-worms' food
Where once they have gone where we all must go."'

Once he repeated the poem containing the lines--

'"Love, when we wandered here together,
Hand in hand through the sparkling weather--
God surely loved us a little then."

Beautiful lines those, Jack.

"Then skies were fairer and shores were firmer,
And the blue sea over the white sand rolled--
Babble and prattle, and prattle and murmur'--

How does it go, Jack?' He stood up and turned his face to the light, but
not before I had a glimpse of it. I think that the saddest eyes on earth
are mostly women's eyes, but I've seen few so sad as the Boss's were
just then.

It seemed strange that he, a Bushman, preferred Gordon's sea poems to
his horsey and bushy rhymes; but so he did. I fancy his favourite poem
was that one of Gordon's with the lines--

'I would that with sleepy soft embraces
The sea would fold me, would find me rest
In the luminous depths of its secret places,
Where the wealth of God's marvels is manifest!'

He usually spoke quietly, in a tone as though death were in camp; but
after we'd been on Gordon's poetry for a while he'd end it abruptly
with, 'Well, it's time to turn in,' or, 'It's time to turn out,' or he'd
give me an order in connection with the cattle. He had been a well-to-do
squatter on the Lachlan river-side, in New South Wales, and had been
ruined by the drought, they said. One night in camp, and after smoking
in silence for nearly an hour, he asked--

'Do you know Fisher, Jack--the man that owns these bullocks?'

'I've heard of him,' I said. Fisher was a big squatter, with stations
both in New South Wales and in Que