Kanga Creek: An Australian Idyll

IT WAS spring; the men about Kanga Creek were away at shearing; the children were mostly at home with whooping cough. It was spring, and the land was growing glorious with wattles; everywhere the feathery and golden festoons hung lightly over the brown earth. Life with the young schoolmaster went much as of old. He had seen his new friend more than once since that meeting under the manna gum-tree by the lagoon. And often on Saturday or Sunday he had taken a book, to walk to the remote lagoon, to sit on a fallen trunk or lie beneath the slight shade of the trees. But somehow he could never read peacefully at that beautiful spot; it seemed there was something there that broke in on his self-contained life. Once or twice, when on the point of setting out in that direction, he had even by a sudden impulse turned off to the high ridges on the left. He no longer dreamed vaguely of love; but sometimes, after he had come out on the verandah in the early morning, and washed at the bucket on a bench, and eaten his porridge with the milk that Bessie had brought from the farm, he stood for a moment in front of a dusty iridescent little window-pane which served as a looking-glass.

The wind wailed and howled among the shea-oaks; the rain poured suddenly and swiftly down; he sat all this gloomy September afternoon of spring on the little bench between the hearth and the window. His book was open on the table before him; it was Marlowe's Faustus, at the vision of Helen of Troy.