For what does it matter if a scribe gain the encouragement of CRITICS and become the hope of the booksellers and circulating libraries that he will write a second bestseller, if the scribe himself does not gain enough profit either to earn the respect of those he lives among or to escape from them?

It was not that I did not hanker for the fleshpots of life, but that I was not constituted to accept the conditions which went with those offered to me. This depressed me acutely, for I was of a sociable nature and loved all that radiance and beauty of the world and life which is open only to those with means.

I had managed to alleviate my early unhappiness about God by discrediting the unpleasant representations of His vindictiveness with which religions abound, by crediting only what was beautiful and noble in conception and by eschewing prayer as a superstition. This helped to diminish God the tyrant, but I had not found God the refuge and helper. One of my elderly friends-by-correspondence was warning me against self-pity as a debilitating affliction and directing my mind towards philosophy, but philosophy is rather an arid diet when one is hungry for adventure and romance.

Thus went the days with empty heads and dusty feet.

’Possum Gully fell back to normal after throwing me up. It grew poorer socially. The genial and conversable Father O’Toole was succeeded by a man with beetling brows and a brogue to match. Our R.C. friends invited us to his inauguration, at which he berated his flock and ordered them to have nothing to do with Protestants under penalty of purgatory. The Reverend peasant was doubtless ambitious for a bishopric, for it seems that in creeds or politics the less Christianity and reason and the more partisanship the surer the official rewards and honours for the protagonists.

Dear little Mr. David had likewise departed. In his stead we had a visitation of English curates. Eusty said they talked like choking magpies, and many a time he had to be driven from the entertainment of mimicking them to his work. They seldom called. They preferred the richer fleshpots of Burrawong, venerated the owner as a “squiah” and mistakenly relegated all cockies to those who should order themselves lowly and reverently to their “bettahs”.

Billy Olliver had removed to a place near Inverell. From the day of the Show I had not seen him nor heard from him. Henry’s consequence had evidently scared him from the course. Billy’s friend, the teacher who had come in Old Harris’s place, took me to task over Billy. He said it was a cruel thing to have broken Billy’s heart—such a true honest fellow—no frill about him, but a thorough gentleman. How could I break his heart when he had never opened the question of love with me at all, how did Billy’s spokesman know that it was not my heart that had been trifled with? EXPERIENCE was showing me that this breaking of hearts and the hope of constancy in AMOUR were mirages like those encountered in the delirium of typhoid fever. I had to take refuge in dreams—dreams of the distant fields so green because they were far away.