I was always hopeful of the mail. I don’t know why, for the mail box only gives back the fruit of what is sown in it, and I had nothing to sow. It was at least a channel of possibility, a Tattersall’s sweep that might throw up a prize, and I hungrily devoured the news of the great, reported in the newspapers.

There was no hope of any eruption in ’Possum Gully, it would need to be an irruption. There was no public road nearer than two miles. There was no stream to attract anglers, nor scenery for a painter, nor rocks for a geologist. My chiefest grudge against it has always been its ugliness. It is ragged rather than rugged, and lacks grandeur. We are too much in the ranges for them to be blue. They are merely sombre. The one glory that I dote and gloat on is the sunset. I love the sinking sun red as a fire between the trunks of the trees upon the hillside, and by running a quarter of a mile up the track can catch the afterglow of the grandeur of transfigured clouds on a more distant horizon.

Great was my astonishment one dull day to find a letter and a large parcel both addressed to me, and with English stamps. The letter had the corner torn off but not enough to divulge the contents. The parcel had been untied, but I was so surprised that I was not resentful of this.. In all my life I had not received so much as a post card written by a hand in another country. I had no idea of the what and why of the parcel, but I trembled with excitement. I galloped part of the way home and in a little gully where the hop scrub was thickest got off to investigate.

The parcel was books. Oh, joy! Had old Harris gone back to England without letting us know? But they were all the same book. Each had the same picture on the cover. I had never seen so many of one book except school readers. And the title of the book was my spoof autobiography—and there was my name printed below it ! ! ! ! It looked so different in print—so conspicuous somehow, that I was frightened.

The letter was from a man I did not know, a business letter, as his name was printed at the top of the stationery. This gentleman wrote that herewith under separate cover he had pleasure in sending me six presentation copies of my novel with the publishers’ compliments. He would be glad to have my acknowledgment in due course.

There in the hop scrub I faced the biggest crisis I have known to date. What on earth was I to do about this? What would Ma say? It was a shock that this thing written as a lark could come back to me as a real book like one written by a grownup educated person. I never in the world thought of an author as resembling myself, not even the feminine ones.