When by myself, I fretted so constantly that the traces it left upon me became evident even to the dull comprehension of Mrs M’Swat.

“I don’t hold with too much pleasure and disherpation, but you ain’t had overmuch of it lately. You’ve stuck at home pretty constant, and ye and Lizer can have a little fly round. It’ll do yous good,” she said.

The dissipation, pleasure, and flying round allotted to “Lizer” and me were to visit some of the neighbours. Those, like the M’Swats, were sheep-farming selectors. They were very friendly and kind to me, and I found them superior to my employers, in that their houses were beautifully clean; but they lived the same slow life, and their soul’s existence fed on the same small ideas. I was keenly disappointed that none of them had a piano, as my hunger for music could be understood only by one with a passion for that art.

I borrowed something to read, but all that I could get in the way of books were a few Young Ladies’ Journals, which I devoured ravenously, so to speak.

When Lizer’s back would be turned, the girls would ask me how I managed to live at Barney’s Gap, and expressed themselves of the opinion that it was the most horrible hole in the world, and Mrs M’Swat the dirtiest creature living, and that they would not go there for 50 pounds a week. I made a point of never saying anything against Mrs M’Swat; but I fumed inwardly that this life was forced upon me, when girls with no longings or aspirations beyond being the wife of a Peter M’Swat recoiled from the thought of it.

My mother insisted upon my writing to her regularly, so once a week I headed a letter “Black’s Camp”, and condemned the place, while mother as unfailingly replied that these bad times I should be thankful to God that I was fed and clothed. I knew this as well as any one, and was aware there were plenty of girls willing to jump at my place; but they were of different temperament to me, and when one is seventeen, that kind of reasoning does not weigh very heavily.

My eldest brother, Horace, twin brother of my sister Gertie, took it upon himself to honour me with the following letter:

Why the deuce don’t you give up writing those letters to mother? We get tongue-pie on account of them, and it’s not as if they did you any good. It only makes mother more determined to leave you where you are. She says you are that conceited you think you ought to have something better, and you’re not fit for the place you have, and she’s glad it is such a place, and it will do you the world of good and take the nonsense out of you — that it’s time you got a bit of sense. Sullivan’s Ginger. After she gets your letters she does jaw, and wishes she never had a child, and what a good mother she is, and what bad devils we are to her. You are a fool not to stay where you are. I wish I could get away to M’Swat or Mack Pot, and I would jump at the chance like a good un. The boss still sprees and loafs about town till some one has to go and haul him home. I’m about full of him, and I’m going to leave home before next Christmas, or my name ain’t what it is. Mother says the kiddies would starve if I leave; but Stanley is coming on like a haystack, I tell him, and he does kick up, and he ought to be able to plough next time. I ploughed when I was younger than him. I put in fourteen acres of wheat and oats this year, and I don’t think I’ll cut a wheelbarrow-load of it. I’m full of the place. I never have a single penny to my name, and it ain’t father’s drinking that’s all to blame; if he didn’t booze it wouldn’t be much better. It’s the slowest hole in the world, and I’ll chuck it and go shearing or droving. I hate this dairying, it’s too slow for a funeral: there would be more life in trapping ‘possums out on Timlinbilly. Mother always says to have patience, and when the drought breaks and good seasons come round again things will be better, but it’s no good of trying to stuff me like that. I remember when the seasons were wet. It was no good growing anything, because every one grew so much that there was no market, and the sheep died of foot-rot and you couldn’t give your butter away, and it is not much worse to have nothing to sell than not be able to sell a thing when you have it. And the long and short of it is that I hate dairying like blue murder. It’s as tame as a clucking hen. Fancy a cove sitting down every morning and evening pulling at a cow’s tits fit to bust himself, and then turning an old separator, and washing it up in a dish of water like a blooming girl’s work. And if you go to a picnic, just when the fun commences you have to nick off home and milk, and when you tog yourself on Sunday evening you have to undress again and lay into the milking, and then you have to change everything on you and have a bath, or your best girl would scent the cow-yard on you, and not have you within cooee of her. We won’t know what rain is when we see it; but I suppose it will come in floods and finish the little left by the drought. The ............