Kanga Creek: An Australian Idyll

THE young schoolmaster through the hot November days languidly submitted to the routine of his daily tasks. There were the same walks through the coarse kangaroo-grass, over the hills, along the gorges by the smooth-limbed apple gums, the lessons and classes, the entries in the registers, the weary walk back in the heat to fling himself down on the little bed, or to throw off his clothes and stir his feet in the cool delicious water. These things were the same.

Yet he himself was no longer altogether the same. He was less absorbed in the quiet intoxication of his own abstract dreams, less ready to be stirred by the stimulus of pure beauty around him. He no longer stood among the hills as in the earlier season, loft in the long sunny silences that were but heightened and enriched by some stray remote sound that floated through them, some measured thud of the threshing flail or faint tinkle of ring-barker's axe, coming one could not say whence. Words and tones, touches, lingering odors, fragmentary visions, came back to him again and again, perpetually, whatever he might be doing. These reminiscences thrilled him, yet their iteration grew wearisome and irritating at length. It was scarcely pleasure and not altogether pain.