That’s what they were—station hands—and I felt as safe with them as with a gum tree. “We won’t be out of Sydney before they will be doing everything for me.”

She gave me a final hug and thanked me for my visit, which she said had brought so many old friends around her and so many new ones that she was quite rejuvenated.

The men, who were shearers, disposed of my luggage and gave me my choice of a seat, just as I expected, and I leaned from the window to draw a breath from the luxuriant gardens of Strathfield, where the lights were putting out the starry evening.

The men talked of the drought and the terrible plight of the land immediately beyond the coastal belt, but the present hour was redeemed by moonlight. Moonlight is as lovely and as thrilling as a phantom. The silver glory etherealises the grimmest landscape. Soon it transformed the drought and filled the wide night universe with mystery and enchantment.

Scent of wattle drifted in from Liverpool onward. The good engine roared and tugged, shaking the tiny houses of fettlers beside the line, on, and on, through the potency of the wide and silent but echoing night. Not a month since I had left the bush, but EXPERIENCE had made it a cycle.

Otherwise I was taking nothing back from the city but a blue sash and the books given to me by Mr. Stephens. I was clearly not a getter. Financially, I was as helpless as Pa. But my retreat was only a withdrawal. I would come again. I must start again from the beginning. I must stick to myself henceforth. I must go beyond Sydney. Few of the people I had met in Sydney had anything more in them basically than those around ’Possum Gully. The difference was in their having and doing, not in their being. There were greater worlds beyond Sydney. I should seek them. But henceforth I should not make holiday for others by exposing my intentions.

As the train pulled in to Bowral, Moss Vale and each little station I pondered on the people who at first predicted that my head would be turned by flattery and lioni-sation, and a little later had accused me of being abnormal or petrified because no one had been able to make any impression on me except through my affections.

Well, there wasn’t a woman among them who could hold a candle to Ma, not in housekeeping, in diction, in reading or in anything to which she addressed her talents. Ma could have kept a big institution shining and well-oiled in every wheel, and yet she was stuck in the bush in a situation in which her capabilities were as wasted as a cannon fired off to quell a mosquito—pure squanderation of the cannon and unnecessarily flattening to the skeet.

Thus I went from spoke to spoke till Goulburn, where I left the train and went to the Commercial for the remainder of the night.